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Sure. That's why --help and man and info exist, along with the volumes of online and printed documentation. The Unix/Linux shell and command line tools have to
by gregjor 2y ago
Sure. That's why --help and man and info exist, along with the volumes of online and printed documentation. The Unix/Linux shell and command line tools have to rank near the top of most-documented software in use.
When I wrote "skills issue" I had in mind the mentality that equates learning the standard tools, mastering the environment, and always improving skills with a waste of time, a few minutes or hours diverted from pasting together API calls or prompting an LLM. I have watched programmers spend hours setting up color schemes and fonts in their IDE, and then complain that they can't remember a flag for grep.
Years ago I worked at a software company where everyone used the Eclipse IDE. I tried it but it felt too slow and buggy, so I fell back to my usual vim in the terminal. Every week or so the team came to a halt when Eclipse got an update to the Subversion SCM plugin (this happened before git took over). Eclipse would have a version of Subversion incompatible with the version on the servers, causing the team to stop to deal with that. I used svn from the command line, same version as the server, so I could keep working. Eclipse broke down so often I couldn't understand the team-wide devotion to it. And they made fun of my "arcane" and obsolete workflow. Now I work with teams who use VSCode and I see the same kind of thing play out -- plugin updates that break the whole environment, weird problems from the bowels of npm that no one can figure out. And they tell me they don't have time to learn vim.