if anyone tells you that a FOSS technology is “really simple”, “intuitive”, or “easy to learn” that is 100% cope. so far I’ve heard this about:

• Rust
• makefiles
• bash scripts
• Linux in general

and the opposite has been true every time. I really wish FOSS people would be more honest with themselves and others about how arcane most FOSS is

@kasdeya things which are not “really simple” or “intuitive” under any circumstances

• computers
• technology

it needs years of experience or study as a baseline requirement for anything related to those things to be intuitive. even then, it’s possible to spend those years only learning a specific facet of computer science which doesn’t overlap with another thing you’re trying to learn

@kasdeya

Valid. But, most users do not need to learn the details in order to have a usable computer.

#UX #UI

@foxysen yess omg thank you! everyone acts like it’s so easy but to me it’s a language made entirely out of footguns lol

@kasdeya @foxysen it’s easy to me in the same way that regex is easy. i can make a quick bash script to fix something, but i really really hope i never have to look at it again or else i’m sending as many curses onto my past self as i can possible manage

@foxysen @kasdeya bash really said

@foxysen @kasdeya it’s not good, but you can look into POSIX shell rather than bash as a stop gap until you find something you like. it’s available where ever bash is available and doesn’t have most of the most ridiculous parts

that or just pick up an interpreted language which is widely available (like python) and write in that

@rowan @foxysen lol that completely makes sense tbh. I was never able to learn how its quirks work (especially quoting a string - holy shit are there a lot of footguns when quoting a string. also it is unbelievably weird and complicated to have a conditional lol) but I imagine after you’ve learned that it’s probably pretty effortless to get something simple working quickly

@foxysen omggg yeah these are exactly the kinds of frustrations I ran into when trying to use bash. it just has way too much backwards-compatibility with bad (IMO) design decisions from decades in the past

@kasdeya On the other hand most Haskellers I know (including myself) tell people that said programming language has both an elevated skill floor and the ceiling is waaaaay out there. Which means a beginner will have a hard time in most codebases just as well. It doesn't exactly help that the functional programming paradigm is not very popular to begin with, and Haskell is very purely so.

What do we win? We'd like more Haskell friends, but I fear we won't be winning many with this track record... But at least we are honest about it.

@fargate I really appreciate the honesty tbh. I wasn’t able to keep learning Rust because of everyone’s attitude about how “easy” it is, so at least if I had tried to learn Haskell instead that wouldn’t’ve been a problem, which would’ve made me more likely to keep going. so that’s something!

@kasdeya @foxysen bash makes it easy* to make a quick** script that solves† a problem‡ ( . . . badly)

*: assuming decades of prior experience

**: it may have taken longer, you'll just not remember all that because initial progress feels fast followed by days of debugging

†: full solution still pending, but it works Well Enough™

‡: problem scope must fit preexisting constraints, should not be used for all problems

@kasdeya @foxysen jokes aside we've still found it useful . . . but it's useful in the way a pocketknife is useful: it's never the right tool for the job, and if i'm reaching for it over a more suitable tool i do it knowing there's a risk i'm going to accidentally hurt myself for the convenience

@foxysen @kasdeya fish is cool, I have fish as default

@foxysen @kasdeya

nah, she'd have *alphis* as default

*aggresively plays the piano*

@foxysen @kasdeya Both, yes. The shell is just much more consistent in its abstractions, and there is no "quote hell". It's not posix compliant, but that's never posed a problem for me.

and it's actually an acronym! it stand for the "friendly interactive shell"!

I had not thought of giving tux a fish to shell xD

<><

@foxysen @kasdeya Good Luck! I hereby grant thee a permit to @ me any time if you are to find troubles in your adventure!

📜