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Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

A lot of dunking of the "git gud" variety going on here, but the author has a solid point. Requiring a novice to learn arcana of a 30 year old Unix system before they can learn to program is purely extraneous.

We could package programming languages up with GUI installers that set everything up correctly and let you get right to the code - and in fact, we used to. If you install IntelliJ, you'll have a fully-working Java environment out of the box. The same for Visual Studio.

Why the "hacker mentality" languages think this sort of user-obsession is beneath them, well, that escapes me...

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> Requiring a novice to learn arcana of a 30 year old Unix system before they can learn to program is purely extraneous.

The thing is, that's the system they are using. Node.js is a programming runtime for that system. Node.js has a GUI installer that sets everything up correctly, it's just not an IDE.

Jetbrains has an IDE, WebStorm, that probably works just as well as the Java one. It can automatically download Node.js for you, so the same experience as for Java is available there as well.

Sure, but when I visit nodejs.org there is a very prominent "Download" button, and no mention at all that I might have an easier time with WebStorm (or another such fully-integrated development package). No links to introductory materials either, I might add.

Those would be fairly trivial changes to the website landing page, but they could drastically reduce the steepness of the on-ramp.

By contrast, if I visit python.org, there is a clear funnel leading me to alternative development environments, beginner tutorials, etc.

Apples to oranges. Python is a language and Node is a runtime.

Compare with https://www.javascript.com/

This. I've been writing code for years, but every time I pull a repo of the latest web app it turns into a series of frustratingly complicated learning exercises. I'm 17 all over again...

npm? got it. whoop. yarn? okay cool nope. bower, now? wow. all set.. no. webpack. done. wait. gulp? okay okay. are we there yet?

What arcana? Windows is not Unix and it uses PATH variable too. On most Linux distros you can simply run the equivalent to `sudo apt-get install nodejs` (or use a graphical front-end, if that's too hard for you) and everything will just work.

Just as an aside, GUI installers are an absolute cancer. I don't mind if there is an option to do that, but I just wish I could make a simple script for installing all the necessary programs on Windows, just like I can on Linux. But no, I have to spend two days doing nothing but manually clicking through the installers, because that's fun.

> What arcana? Windows is not Unix and it uses PATH variable too.

That's a whole additional world of arcana, since the Windows PATH variable works subtly differently, and is configured through a (fairly obtuse) GUI in an unrelated settings panel.

> On most Linux distros you can simply run the equivalent to `sudo apt-get install nodejs`

The OP is however on a Mac, where there isn't a default package manager. Now suddenly novices have to go learn about the differences between Homebrew vs MacPorts, and why neither one works properly on their shiny new MacBook.

> Just as an aside, GUI installers are an absolute cancer

For us linux sysadmins? Sure. For the rest of the world GUI installers are just how computers work.

You can for the most part (I've done exactly that for the dependencies of a windows-developed system). Almost all installers support an unattended or 'silent' installation mode through a command line switch, though it can be a bit of a pain to get them to work the way you want.

On windows, you can automate the installs of software that comes as `msi` files, by the way - kind of obscure, but its how you can easily do that.

The problem is that without understanding the "arcana" of the OS platform you're using, you'll quickly hit a brick wall with your IDE. You won't understand what the configuration options mean, you won't understand what the documentation or people on StackOverflow want you to do and why. IDEs are mostly an abstraction over a set of CLI tools; if you try to do anything nontrivial, you'll see where the abstraction leaks.

This is true of quite a few of the kludgy build-an-IDE-out-of-plugins environments popular in the open-source world (Atom, VS Code, Vim-as-IDE, etc), but that's precisely the problem I'm getting at.

It doesn't tend to be true of mature IDE-first environments (see the aforementioned Visual Studio or IntelliJ).

I'm talking strictly about mature IDE-first environments. Visual Studio (which I use daily for C++ development), IntelliJ (which I used for Java some time ago) and AndroidStudio (i.e. IntelliJ with plugins, and it's probably the most leaky abstraction of an IDE I've ever seen).

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