Hacker News Reader

All this time after writing this article, I’m now realizing a better way to sum up the issue:

It’s like when you ask “can I go to the bathroom” and the teacher says “I dunno, CAN you?”

Your rant is very valid by the way. I didn’t have these particular problems but you captured the essence of similar experiences I’ve had with other tools. Just the thougt of tinkering with something im not familiar gives me the goosebumps, maybe a little nausea, shortness of breath. Maybe it’s some form of PTSD gradually accumulated over the years. In the end it’s no big deal if you don’t expect things to work logically and things to work from the first try.

I think it's a totally valid rant too. We get so used to our tools laughing at us saying "Ha ha ha! You didn't say the magic word!" And then a few searches or manual lookups later, you learn the magic word and use it, the tools say "Ha ha ha! We've deprecated that function!" And slowly through our careers, we just start accepting it as an inevitable fact of programming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com