I started responding to Philip Guo’s Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery that passed through my news feeds today, and my thought quickly outgrew the appropriate size for social media, so it’s going up here.
I understand and often share his frustration, but only selectively agree with his conclusion, and would like to clarify the distinction because I think it is very valuable to understand it.
It is often annoyingly difficult to leverage existing tools, especially the various development toolchains whose install process involves blood sacrifice or perfect replication of the (naturally, undocumented) platform they were developed on, but I object to dismissing all such difficulty as bullshit.
