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Comment by throwaway984393 | Hacker News Reader

This happens so often. A developer could just read a man page or learn something deeply by example, but they don't. Instead they struggle for the rest of their lives in ignorance, even going so far as to adopt a hack to avoid having to learn a new thing. They will go far out their way to not learn a new thing, and over time, cause themselves untold misery.

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I think there's a bit more nuance than just ignorance. In some ways, I think reinventing the wheel is almost inevitable when we require backwards compatibility but prefer sane defaults. The expectations around what exactly should happen when making an HTTP request have evolved over time, but we can't change the way that `curl` behaves by default with potentially breaking stuff all over the place. In the same way that I don't judge people who use MacOS because it "just works" instead of using Linux like me, I don't think it's fair to treat people who don't want to spend a lot of time learning how to ask a tool to do what another tool will do without needing to spend any extra effort as if they're somehow failing as competent developers.

Except there are about a million ways to do this that don't involve releasing another tool. Everyone I know (including myself) would make an alias, that's entirely what they're for. If you want to get really fancy, you could make it a function in your shell's rc file. Or if you're REALLY zesty, you could even write an entire shell script for it.

To a senior, tools like this make no sense, because they're unnecessary, and contribute to bloat and waste, both for systems, and for the time spent.

Many people cherish simplicity. They don't want to remember arcane spells of args. They want sane/comfy defaults. It has nothing to do with ignorance, they simply refuse to use something your way.

The point of having man pages is that you don't have to remember "arcane spells of args". For huge manpages or manpages in general there is certainly a learning curve on how to read and apply them effectively. But it's also an underrated way of learning about the system you use and deploy your applications on.

I can't even get developers to read error messages, let alone documentation. The number of times I've had senior (by title) individuals send me screenshots of stack traces asking for help is too damn high. This field is a joke.

Yes, it happens a lot to me as well. However it baffles me why I would ever want to download and install a tool when I could just read a man page and create an alias for curl and some args. It's a perfectly capable tool that comes with every conceivable distribution.

You don't listen/understand: man pages are for learning. Just imagine a user refusing to learn and not because of said user's ignorance. You probably didn't invent a new class of programs that do something absolutely new, you just wrote a program with poor design/defaults that require the user to learn how to use said program rather things be intuitive in general.

It is ignorance, because aliases and shell scripts have existed for eons, and this is an overkill solution for a non-issue. I have a bunch of aliases for common flag combinations; I haven't released any of them as entirely separate programs.

man pages vary in complexity/readability, and for occasional use, is probably way more painful

Sorry you're getting downvoted and probably flagged, but I agree with you. The fact that someone made an entirely separate thing for this is mind-boggling, when a simple shell alias solves this problem, and takes literally 60 seconds to set up.

But then again, this is the same industry that thinks shipping 600 MB of Node packages and an entire instance of Chromium is what it takes to use ffmpeg, so, I'm not surprised, just disappointed.

Bah ? OP just added a thin-wrapper, to easy many people's lifes. Why write your own shell alias when it can be setup by default, for free ?

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