4 ms·

Why? You are allowed to point out failings without having a perfect solution at hand.

kichimi 6y ago
He's asking you to back up your assertations. If all you have is an easily produced vague thought then it can be dismissed just as easily.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25789651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25789651
ccmcarey 6y ago
It's just kind of .. pathetic, to make statements like: > Programming is massively over-complicated for no useful reason And then offer absolutely no justification for why this is the case, and to shrug off any questions as to what obvious improvements could be made. You offer no useful contributions to the conversation by doing this. None.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  Well, here's an example: You can develop a fully featured, world-class iOS app, and distribute it, without even touching a command line. Nothing in the process would get easier by touching a command line. You just don't need it. There is a fully-featured environment that provides all the tooling you need without it.
  - d3ckard 6y ago
    You do realize some of us use command line not because we have to, but because it’s usually easier to do so?
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      Yes, of course. Because your other tools are so bad that even the command line is easier. I am saying, the fact that those tools are bad is not a given. We could have better tools.
      - d3ckard 6y ago
        And do you have any proof of that? Because in my humble opinion, the command line is great solely because keyboard is (up to now) the best input device we have invented. Any graphical tool requires eye-hand coordination, which slows things down considerably. Using keyboard you basically only depend on your muscle memory and can input commands to the machine way more quickly. What you seem to miss is that developers tools are the best tools created in computer science, period. That's because we use them and we usually are too lazy to deal with stuff that bothers us, so we improve over time(and much faster than we do with tools for our customers). The only real problem is the learning curve, which is hard to avoid. So no, those tools are not bad. They just require some learning first, as pretty much any tool on this planet. And yes, we could have better tools and we will have, that's how progress works. You just didn't make any useful suggestions how to get there faster.
        user-the-name 6y ago
        The proof is that I develop for iOS, and I do not need to use the command line at all for this. Using it does not make anything easier and more efficient. It live this every day. I can use the command line. I've used it for decades. I know it intimately, and I know just how many problems it has. Problems it doesn't NEED to have, but problems that we have just decided will be there, and we learn them, and live with them, and then complain when someone points out that they are, in fact, problems. Developer tools really, REALLY aren't the best tools created, in any way, shape, or form. They are generally AWFUL. But we've convinced ourselves that we are clever if we know how to use these awful tools.
        d3ckard 6y ago
        You repeat the previous content without any example on how they are better. To you it seems that not having to use command line is an advantage. To me it's not, making your argument moot.
  - lionkor 6y ago
    And it's very domain-specific, which is why it's super easy to make it so simple.
pjc50 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. This is in reply to > We've just chosen to keep things like this because we think it makes us clever. Sneering at the unspecified "we". > Programming can and should be much, much more user friendly than it is now Work has been done on programming language accessibility for decades. It's often been controversial, e.g. Dijkstra versus BASIC, despite the huge practical success of BASIC as an introductory language across the microcomputer revolution. It's not enough to assert that something should be better, you've got to say something about how, in a way that at least acknowledges what has been tried already. (Many of the ways in which the Javascript ecosystem is "bad" are the result of it being a horrible commercial battlefield over who gets to control the internet and all the computers connected to it and for what purpose)

He's asking you to back up your assertations. If all you have is an easily produced vague thought then it can be dismissed just as easily.

user-the-name 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25789651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25789651

ccmcarey 6y ago

It's just kind of .. pathetic, to make statements like: > Programming is massively over-complicated for no useful reason And then offer absolutely no justification for why this is the case, and to shrug off any questions as to what obvious improvements could be made. You offer no useful contributions to the conversation by doing this. None.

user-the-name 6y ago
Well, here's an example: You can develop a fully featured, world-class iOS app, and distribute it, without even touching a command line. Nothing in the process would get easier by touching a command line. You just don't need it. There is a fully-featured environment that provides all the tooling you need without it.
- d3ckard 6y ago
  You do realize some of us use command line not because we have to, but because it’s usually easier to do so?
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    Yes, of course. Because your other tools are so bad that even the command line is easier. I am saying, the fact that those tools are bad is not a given. We could have better tools.
    - d3ckard 6y ago
      And do you have any proof of that? Because in my humble opinion, the command line is great solely because keyboard is (up to now) the best input device we have invented. Any graphical tool requires eye-hand coordination, which slows things down considerably. Using keyboard you basically only depend on your muscle memory and can input commands to the machine way more quickly. What you seem to miss is that developers tools are the best tools created in computer science, period. That's because we use them and we usually are too lazy to deal with stuff that bothers us, so we improve over time(and much faster than we do with tools for our customers). The only real problem is the learning curve, which is hard to avoid. So no, those tools are not bad. They just require some learning first, as pretty much any tool on this planet. And yes, we could have better tools and we will have, that's how progress works. You just didn't make any useful suggestions how to get there faster.
      - user-the-name 6y ago
        The proof is that I develop for iOS, and I do not need to use the command line at all for this. Using it does not make anything easier and more efficient. It live this every day. I can use the command line. I've used it for decades. I know it intimately, and I know just how many problems it has. Problems it doesn't NEED to have, but problems that we have just decided will be there, and we learn them, and live with them, and then complain when someone points out that they are, in fact, problems. Developer tools really, REALLY aren't the best tools created, in any way, shape, or form. They are generally AWFUL. But we've convinced ourselves that we are clever if we know how to use these awful tools.
        d3ckard 6y ago
        You repeat the previous content without any example on how they are better. To you it seems that not having to use command line is an advantage. To me it's not, making your argument moot.
- lionkor 6y ago
  And it's very domain-specific, which is why it's super easy to make it so simple.

pjc50 6y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. This is in reply to > We've just chosen to keep things like this because we think it makes us clever. Sneering at the unspecified "we". > Programming can and should be much, much more user friendly than it is now Work has been done on programming language accessibility for decades. It's often been controversial, e.g. Dijkstra versus BASIC, despite the huge practical success of BASIC as an introductory language across the microcomputer revolution. It's not enough to assert that something should be better, you've got to say something about how, in a way that at least acknowledges what has been tried already. (Many of the ways in which the Javascript ecosystem is "bad" are the result of it being a horrible commercial battlefield over who gets to control the internet and all the computers connected to it and for what purpose)