2 karma · joined August 27, 2023
In all seriousness, it's a valid opinion. All the best programmers I know had relatively bare bones setups. I've found when I get in the habit of using IDEs are things like ChatGPT, I start to get sloppy. If the language server or whatever is tracking the logic of the code to tell you whether it will parse correctly, then you aren't using your brain as much to do it.
There are all different kinds of self taught. The highest performers in any discipline are naturally going to tend to be self taught (for a variety of reasons, and not exclusively, many have formal education or training as well, and without exception they will have had some form of mentorship). But so are the lowest.There is a huge range of skill level among the self taught, including a lot of people that are so far ahead academically that they would get nothing out of doing the typical university education thing.
But I don't think a total lack of a standard was what should have replaced Unix standardization efforts.
I think my real issue with Linux is that it is increasingly complicated (both the kernel and most distributions). It doesn't feel as "open source" as some of the not even quite open source Unix's, because you need to be a domain expert in a particular area for you to be able to modify it correctly. When you've got a team of people responsible for the whole OS as a single package, there is some incentive to keep your area maintainable. You never know who is going to be switching teams or knocking on your door. With Linux the incentive structure is to make a name for yourself as "the <particular subsystem or utility program> guy", which opens up a lot of potential for feature creep and overengineering.