[PuffinBlue]

Nothing that you wrote really comes across as anything but 'yeah, Hugo is complicated'. Which is sort of the point of the specific call out of Hugo.

And I've been using it for a very long time now. I actually wrote the original _index.md explainer page for the docs at the time the switch was made to stop it being 'abused' for section front matter. At least, I think that was the work around people were using, I forget after all the changes there have been.

Hugo is a powerful tool. I'm sure there are ways to do almost anything with it, and some of them answer the critiques in the article. But it's constantly changing (it's still a long way from version 1.0) and its power and flexibility bring a steep learning curve and their own way of doing things, which seems to also be what the article is commenting on in general with static site generators.

[fvsch]

My point in that article was indeed about complexity and the difficulty of learning many concepts. How do you figure which concepts are actually "the same"? If they are indeed the same, why ask users to pay the cognitive cost of learning five concepts then figure out that they’re synonyms? But are they really the same, though? I gather that they must do a few things differently. In my experience when I renamed a `index.md` to `_index.md`, I lost access to one feature and got access to a new one (my issue was that I actually needed both!).

The section I wrote about Hugo, and indeed my whole article, is not purely about technical capabilities. It’s about user capabilities when using specific software, so there’s some focus on what the software can do, but also on the user’s perception of what the software can do and on the learning curve.

In my day-and-a-half with Hugo, I’ve read most of the docs twice, and have read some old issues and release notes. It looks like some of the complexity in Hugo’s design comes from adding features and redesigning some features over time. This process tends to accumulate cruft, and calls for compromise between conceptual clarity and backwards compatibility.

At one point I’ve read release note (for 0.20 I think) that said something like “from now on, everything is a Page”, but was surprised that different kinds of pages had access to different kind of data, somewhat arbitrarily. By contrast, if you start with a concept like “everything is a page and has a predictable feature set”, it’s easier to have this simpler design correctly implemented and correctly reflected in documentation.

[kaushalmodi]

My comment was directed at the incorrect statements that sound like facts that the author made.

I am not saying that people are born knowing how to use Hugo. Hugo is powerful. If you want to tweak it (the theme), change how your site looks and all, you would need to understand how Hugo works, learn templating,etc.

If you are happy with one of the existing templates, you don't need most of that.

Nothing comes for free. You either learn or live with what an existing theme has. I think, this applies, to anything in general.