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Comment by 010a | Hacker News Reader

I really feel like this isn't a general problem, but rather a problem with a subset of development environments.

Node (backend) definitely doesn't have a similar problem. Want an express app? Install node -> npm i express --save -> node app.js.

Go doesn't have it either, whether you're using the base tool or GVM. Python requires a minuscule setup in virtualenv, but beyond that its straightforward. Elixir and Rust are straight-forward.

In fact, the only environments where I've ever thought "wow this is a configuration nightmare" are front-end web dev, Ruby, and in really complex python apps, obviously notwithstanding less common app environments like C/C++.

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To be fair, the parent to your comment included lots of steps that assumed the user was starting from scratch. If we assume the same for the user making an Express app, the steps are much more complex:

* Install a C++ compiler (XCode or libssl-dev packages)

* Run the NVM install script

* Use NVM to install Node.js

* npm install express-generator -g

* express myapp

* cd myapp; npm install

* Install or update Homebrew

* Install git

* git init

* Install Mongo (or your db of choice)

* Install Mongo packages via npm

* npm start

Really? This steps you just listed are similarly complex to what's in that React article? No No bruh.... 30 screens -- down-button-presses down and we're still seting up for a frontend sample app. This is so so an issue, Node(backend), Go and Rails and Py aint got.

I'm not comparing my steps to the React article. I'm comparing them to the steps in the comment I was responding to.

Anyway, measuring steps in terms of "screens" is woefully inaccurate. For example, the author of the post uses more than one screen on simply running `npm init`, because he includes unnecessary paragraphs and screenshots. Many other parts of his post are even more verbose.

I could rewrite the first 30 "screens" of his post in 1-2 "screens". Would that mean that the process is suddenly 30x easier?

Your examples aren't a front end application though... The tooling alone has a lot of options... same for desktop apps... are you going to go GTK, QT, Win32, some toolkit on top, what tooling do you need to construct your app, will you use an XML to language process? What about build constructs or third party libraries?

Front end applications of any kind of complexity are NOT simple... treating them as toys, and expecting them to grow in complexity doesn't work.

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