I don't think the author ever said that you shouldn't be able to configure an application. It's more about proper default configs. Default configs are, incident

I don't think the author ever said that you shouldn't be able to configure an application. It's more about proper default configs. Default configs are, incidentaly, an important part of the Unix philosophy of "program that does one things well". Since it does one thing, it's easier to guess which default configs should be shipped with it. mkdir doesn't, for example, explicitly demand permissions with which to create a folder (but you can do that: mkdir -m 777 dirname). less doesn't require you to tell it whether to squeeze consecutive blank lines into one (but you can: less --squeeze-blank-lines). It's especially sad to see JS community forgo this principle, since it seems to embrace modularity (as in "one module that does one thing well") so much. Babel 6 and Webpack could've been so much more fun to use if they came with sane configs out of the box.