Hacker News Reader

Comment by apocalyptic0n3 | Hacker News Reader

That scenario plays itself out time and time again.

1. Base technology arrives and is adopted en masse

2. Some entity wraps it in an easier-to-use interface

3. After some time, that interface becomes the de facto standard

4. Developers who started developing after #2 and especially #3 don't understand how the underlying technology works or even that the wrapper is just a wrapper

I'm reminded of how many Juniors I trained that didn't know jQuery was itself just a Javascript library and not a language in and of itself. None of them knew much of any of the underlying Javascript it was wrapping. I'm seeing the same scenario play out with React and Vue right now as well.

View on HN

I find this so weird, I always feel like I have to at least a bird's eye view of how bits and bytes are flowing through the system. Not that a lot of boxes I don't just label as "magic", but at least I need to know the box exists

I'm having a difficult time picturing how these hypothetical juniors will fare without that underlying curiosity driving them forward. Likely they'll wash out of the industry or see enough success to be promoted to a management position.

That entity is usually Microsoft. I've met web developers who relied on Microsoft drag-and-drop tools to build websites, they were unable to tell me what a cookie or HTTP request was. Microsoft could be injecting telemetry into their websites and they wouldn't know.

Since then I've been obsessed with knowing how things work under the hood and doing as much as possible by myself until I understand what's being abstracted away from me.

Is the takeaway here, then, to beat third parties to the punch when creating a new technology and include a first-party easy-to-use interface right out of the gate?

Yes and no, IMO.

Yes, sure, that could be one useful strategy.

But no, you can't demand it as some kind of mandatory component for a project to "count as a real FOSS project".

And for git, especially... It's not as if an easy-to-use interface had ever been a priority there. ;-) What one could ask for from them, though, IMO, would be a website of their own where they at least explain what it is. Because if such a thing exists, I must have missed it. I mean, git-scm.whatever isn't that, is it? That feels more like... Idunno, it's actually Atlassian in a thin disguise, isn't it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com