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Oh man, this has been on my mind lately. I’ve been considering writing a thinkpiece on the word “just” in software tutorials, as in “just install Python” or the
by hairofadog 5y ago
Oh man, this has been on my mind lately. I’ve been considering writing a thinkpiece on the word “just” in software tutorials, as in “just install Python” or the worst offender, “just NPM install --save-dev” as if that, with no other information, is enough, when what they’re really saying is “just do this and then all that other complicated stuff you should have learned already”. I think it’s fine to preface a tutorial with “this assumes you’ll know x, y, and z” but wow do I see a lot of “installation instructions: npm install --save-dev” where the reality is two days of troubleshooting to get a thing working.
- sandinmyjoints 5y agoI have thought of writing the same article! Someone needs to do it.
- pawurb 5y agoI actually did not a long while ago https://pawelurbanek.com/dangerous-word-slack https://pawelurbanek.com/dangerous-word-slack
- thih9 5y agoI’ve just read it; now I’m curious: are you still using your original solution? At some point you mention false positives; how annoying are these in practice?
- pawurb 5y agoHonestly, it was a theoretical idea I've had after having been a "just police" in my previous team. I can imagine that setting trigger to "just" would probably be an overkill in many cases. If I were to implement it now I'd start with "let's just" and "why not simply" is also a good candidate.
- andrei_says_ 5y agoAs someone who spent a day figuring out that I need to downgrade node to make node-scss work, ant that’s the only way forward to boot up a rails app,… yea.
- jonny_eh 5y agoWhy not just switch to libsass-asm ;)
- zamalek 5y agoOh, that's a cool package. I find it strange that the least compatible implementation of sass is used by default by so many packages.
- andrei_says_ 5y agoI’d switch to dart-sass but I also know not to touch Rails’ default webpacker config. I know not to put my fingers in the sharp internals of the webpack configuration.
- emteycz 5y agoI never install Node without NVM since I had that problem.
- Nition 5y agoThis sort of thing seems especially bad on Linux, maybe because of the assumption that anyone using Linux already knows more than the average user.
- dmckeon 5y ago> because of the assumption that anyone using Linux already knows more than the average user. Or approximately as much as the assumer.
- cercatrova 5y agoThis has been written: https://justsimply.dev https://justsimply.dev
- lvncelot 5y ago"Running NPM install --save-dev is left as an exercise to the reader".