471–480 of 624 posts
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> Yeah like there's 20 years of programming language research that studies exactly what this person is talking about. More like 50 years. :)
Relevant alan kay video from 1968 https://youtu.be/QQhVQ1UG6aM
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Unless it's -V for verbose. Or -i for infile. Or no flag for infile. Or no flag for outfile. Or...
fair, there are commandline tools by third parties that dont conform. From reading your other comments, though, I can tell that you likely don't enjoy learning complicated systems in order to leverage them for your advantage. Just like the author of the article, you complain on and on, without displaying any sort of passion for the good things this complexity brings.
If the author has “been playing with the web and code for years” and is still “wtf” on /usr/local/bin in $PATH it shows a lack of discipline and structure in their learning. I see this in many in many of my apprentices - the desire for instant gratification and the lack of experience means they refuse to do anything that doesn’t immediately proceed them closer to their goal. Here’s the thing with programming - you ca…
> Stop trying to assemble a fully functional car with no understanding of the fundamentals and then getting frustrated that car assembly is difficult. Most of these people find driving hard. You have to put the liquid in the hole and turn the key and keep pressing the floor-thing and hold the circle thing all while looking out the window to make sure no one gets in your way and the car stays on the hard paths. What t…
Ive been to college with these people. Their mindset is "Im so much better than you. If only this stupid computer would read my mind, I'd be making 10x what you make."
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Which one? Please explain how it's pointless. What is esoteric about typing which program you want to run?
I love the command line and use it all the time. But let's be honest, the design is pretty esoteric. You want to find a file containing a particular string? For some reason the tool is called 'grep'. The name is followed by '-r' then the search term, then the directory to start the search in. And it won't be long before you start encountering tools with such intuitive names as 'sed' and 'awk' and 'crontab' The tool f…
You bet that `ls`/`cd` is a great name for me - it takes 2 characters and I don't have anything similar conflicting on the PATH.
For a beginner? Not so much - `change-directory` and `list-directory` would probably be better. It's the same with regular expressions `^[A-Z0-9]{0, 3}$` is perfectly readable once you're reasonably familiar with the syntax.
It's also true in other fields such as mathematics or music - the notation is quite good once you're proficient in it.
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Like what? Please be specific or we can't have a meaningful discussion. I use Bash a fair amount and I don't consider it overly complicated as a shell. There are some rough edges in Unix, like handling spaces in directories, and I'm no fan of Bash as a scripting language, but I wouldn't say the basic model of the Unix command-line interface is overly complicated.
I addressed these points in one of my comments a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25305575 I admit that I'm kind of conflating the concept of a terminal emulator, a shell and a shell language, but the shell model has plenty to improve upon.
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While it's a massive simplification of programming as a whole, I think you're at least partly right. Programming is in some cases over-complicated, for no reason. If you dig deeper however, you'll sometimes learn that the thing you considered overly complicated, was actually designed that way, not to annoy you, but because the same tool has to support use cases you didn't consider or don't understand. That's not to s…
>Programming is in some cases over-complicated, for no reason. Which part is over-complicated for no reason?
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iOS has one of the most pathetic development toolings in existence. Your statement truly shows how unaware you are of actually good toolings and solutions for software development, and, frankly, you should not say a single word more about software development experience, if only not to embarrass yourself even further.
Nonsense.
At least pro-console users had some sort of argument for their setups.
You cannot comprehend a simple idea that there are much better ways to develop software, than crippling, mind-bogglingly bad Xcode and friends.
And my company is actually working on this exact thing right now and we'll be sharing more info on how we think it works very soon!
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The author is 100% correct on everything. Programming is massively over-complicated for no useful reason. Programmers tend to get very proud of the completely pointless knowledge they have to acquire to use the pointlessly complicated tools they do, and they confuse that with being clever. It's not. It's really not. Nothing has to be this esoteric and annoying. We've just chosen to keep things like this because we th…
> Programming can and should be much, much more user friendly than it is now. For what sort of users? It's clear a number of people here consider the command line difficult. I do not. There are many tools that make simple tasks very simple. I use it for manipulating tab files. I can pipe data through scripts and back through command line utilities, pipe it directly into a database, or do the reverse. It's very simple…
Consider all the things you've committed to memory that you've had to learn to do those things: all the archaic command names, all the one-letter switches, all the unreadable awk lines to re-jigger the formatting between tools, all the gotchyas and edge-cases you had to deal with in your scripting language, etc.
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Nonsense.
Oh, but it absolutely is not! You are most probably experiencing Stockholm syndrome towards iOS development experience, given lack of alternatives. At least pro-console users had some sort of argument for their setups. You cannot comprehend a simple idea that there are much better ways to develop software, than crippling, mind-bogglingly bad Xcode and friends.
I still find Xcode very productive, pleasant to use, and far better than almost any alternative I have seen.
It has some annoying bugs, some annoying limitations, but none that would make it any worse than the absolute shitshows you get elsewhere.
I do know what I am talking about, here. I have done a lot of this.