Comment by dangoljames | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangoljames | Hacker News Reader

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The one thing that all the negative commentary fails to acknowledge is that even in the face of this somewhat overstated inconsistency across all these command line tools and applications, is that for the knowledgeable and motivated, it is quite simple to wrap the more complex invocations in simplified scripts or, at the other extreme, a completely functional native GUI.

They also fail to acknowledge that contemporary unix, aka Linux in it's many derivations and flavors, is entirely malleable at the source code level by it's users. That is a feature provided by literally no other operating system that is deployable at scale, and is, in fact, the singular feature that drives it's adoption -- not only is it 'free', you can hack it together in any fashion you damn well please, and you can use it to build peer-grade native applications, typically with little more than a tip of the hat as 'overhead'.

tl;DR: Some folks might miss the point because they are not sufficiently motivated to engage the *nix world with the degree of articulation required to tap into it's less than casually accessible capabilities.

Sigh. Why are there still lots, heaps, and tons of horrible, inhumane, broken legacy technology still around in active use? Because its users/proponents are "knowledgeable and motivated" enough to keep pushing through. Sort of a Stockholm syndrome of computing, really.

My brain is really quite small compared to all the knowledge about computers that is out there. And my willpower too is very limited. So I would rather learn things I'd rather like to know, and be motivated to do things I'd rather get done instead of spending those precious resources of mine (and time! I will die in less than 25,000 days, that's a pretty small amount of time, you know) on something of dubious value.

They are still around because, through historical accident, they are what everyone knows and uses.

Making a special snowflake that fits your brain better is good for you, but not necessarily anyone else.

Making something good for everyone will, almost inevitably, become a design-by-committee monstrosity that is as problematic as the tool being replaced.

The truth is, I am skeptical that these tools can be replaced by something that requires no effort to learn. At least, for the tools we already have, if you dont want to learn them, you can roll the dice and copy / paste from google overflow.

> Making a special snowflake that fits your brain better is good for you, but not necessarily anyone else.

Yes, and that's why the parent's argument that "you can hack it together in any fashion you damn well please, and you can use it to build peer-grade native applications, typically with little more than a tip of the hat as 'overhead'" is not a convincing argument. Yes, you can learn a lot about it and tinker with it and "harness its power", as opposed to using something that's less flexible, but is already pretty damn ergonomical, and is much more accessible and easy to learn about (maybe to the point you're not even realizing you're learning).

>>"It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all."

It's one thing to learn something like physics for dumb engineers. Or Thermodynamics. Mechanical dynamics. Differential equations. Where it's hard to get your brain wrapped around. But there light at the end of the tunnel.

Vs obtuse half broken shit people created out of whole cloth and refuse to fix.

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