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Comment by pluc | Hacker News Reader

Precisely. The abstraction of knowledge is a cultural staple of that ecosystem. It's great and all, but you end up with developers who have no understanding of what is happening when they click "next next next next yes finish". On Linux, that understanding is a core pillar of the culture. Stark contrasts.

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I'm having fun jumping into this conflict. Since I'm unabashedly on one side of the argument, I feel equipped and compelled to weigh in. The work my small team does is well documented, and when we execute our plans, we can click "next next etc." and everything works quite nicely. You're absolutely correct that I do not want to have an understanding of what is happening when I click next. I have a lot of other things that I need to understand. Humans for example do not have any "next" button so I spend a lot of time wrangling us. When the computer does what I think it out to do, then you're right I am not going to dig in. That's true. Inevitably I'm sometimes surprised when the computer doesn't do what I think it ought to, and I do have to dig in. Then I am perfectly happy to debug the situation. We figure out what's going on, fix it in the near term, update the documentation to address this in the long term, and then go back to clicking "next next etc." I call this productivity. I guess you could look down on me for not wanting to know things I am not getting paid to know. I look at it as saving my limited brain cells and attention for things I am getting paid to deal with.

I’m a macOS/Linux person, but I feel this is a bit of a hot take.

I see Linux users copy and paste commands into their terminals all the time, sometimes without understanding what they’re doing. How is that different from clicking “next, next, next” in a GUI?

Interacting with a computer using ZSH instead of a GUI isn’t inherently better. It’s just different. Knowing how to run basic shell commands doesn’t tell you anything about a person’s understanding of how computers work.

Plenty of non-technical people can run basic shell commands. It doesn’t mean they understand how virtual memory works, or what DNS is, or how computers store files on disk.

This is such a 1996 take.

Create react app.

> Create react app

Okay. How about ...

* dotnet new mvc

* dotnet new api

* dotnet new blazor

* dotnet new grpc

I like (and use) Node, but modern DotNet can easily hold it's own.

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