Why? You are allowed to point out failings without having a perfect solution at hand.
> 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.
I am saying, the fact that those tools are bad is not a given. We could have better tools.
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.
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.
I know how to use the command line. I could do it. But there is no reason to do so. It would not do a better job than the tools I have been given in the GUI.
1. It's faster. You can(and will after some time) remember hundreds of different commands. That means that to make computer do something, you just need to type. Typing is usually way faster than clicking in GUI, especially for non-trivial tasks, which require moving through several layers of GUI.
2. It's scriptable. I can automate pretty much anything invokable from command line through.
3. It's gluable. I can connect output of the program to any workflow I imagine.
All of those are usually strictly worse in GUI. Of course, GUI has it's uses(analysing data is usually easier in graphical environment) and there is nothing wrong with your personal preference. I object solely to your qualification of CLI being worse just because of your own taste.
Sure, in some cases, those are useful. But not always. And programming, in general, is not really a case where those things are useful on a minute-to-minute basis.
In your opinion
Trying to project your personal preferences as objective reality is not helpful. You don't like CLIs, fine. You sound like you've got some good reasons to not like them. Your assumption that everyone else shares your values is a little weird.
Personally, I love the CLI and have yet to find many instances where the GUI is easier to use and more useful than the CLI alternative. Does this mean I think all GUIs are objectively bad? Of course not. It's personal preference.
But the fact remains, they are not useful when doing iOS programming, because the tooling provided does a BETTER job than the command line.
> because the tooling provided does a BETTER job than the command line.
Once again, better for you.
I think it could be a lot less of the two former and a lot more of the latter. But it will not be, because people are unwilling to even admit it has any flaws.
> 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)