[jckzlg]

> In general this is against our principles. We prefer to teach people how to use powerful tools rather than make less powerful tools that are easier to use.

I agree deeply with the ethos this statement represents. It's hard for me to formulate at the moment what I think this "ethos" is exactly, but I think it's really important. I'll try to explain by example. I think we should favor manpages over Stack Overflow, documentation over Google, composable CLI tools over monolithic IDEs, etc. I think that every engineer on a team should have read the most popular O'Reilly book (or some equivalent) for each of the tools the team works with. Of course, these "rules" are not commandments and we should always strive to be prudent.

Sometimes I'm accused of being cranky for these sorts of opinions, and I guess I might be, but I also see so much time and money wasted because nobody in an organization understands basic tools like SSH or how to use systemd.

The other day there was a developer tool on the front page of hacker news that lets you "run apps in the cloud from the comfort of your own editor". This is in my opinion a sign of the techpocalypse.

Edit: s/UPPERCASE/italics/

[TeMPOraL]

I generally agree with you. Especially strongly on the point about books.

It is my observation that, just as much as Stack Overflow and various on-line cheatsheets are replacing man pages (which is unfortunate), man pages are replacing info pages. By that I mean they aren't thorough enough. My eyes opened to that point when I started browsing M-x info in my Emacs, and run across documentation of non-Emacs things. Info pages tend to be more like a book than a short manual. And it's great, since if you're going to be using a tool semi-regularly, going through a book explaining it is a boost in learning time and scope.

And as a more general point: I miss the times when software shipped with book-sized manuals.

> run apps in the cloud from the comfort of your own editor". This is in my opinion a sign of the techpocalypse

I guess it depends on where you compose. The above goes against Unix philosophy, but not necessarily against Emacs philosophy. I.e. I consider Emacs as a 2D interface to composable applications (vs. 1D interface a command line is). So a bit of Elisp that implements a cloud API provides a piece that can be composed with just about every other piece of Elisp in Emacs, yielding a solution that's both composable and convenient :).

[jckzlg]

The issue here in my opinion is not that someone would “run apps in the cloud from your editor”, it’s that a software engineer would need or want an entire SaaS product for such a trivial task.

[thayne]

> I think we should favor manpages over Stack Overflow, documentation over Google

these are not really comparable things. I definitely don't think that Stack Overflow should replace man pages, but I still find Stack Overflow valuable. It's value is in finding how someone else solved a problem similar to the one you had, or where you go to ask other developers for help when the your attempt at finding the needed information in the documentation has failed.

[jckzlg]

I almost entirely agree, and I think the word "favor" wasn't the best choice. My opinion is that many developers will often consult Google or Stack Overflow before consulting a manpage or documentation or will only briefly consult documentation before a Google search. I'm definitely guilty of this, especially when I'm under a tight deadline, but I think it's a behavior that should be avoided when possible. Navigating documentation and/or manpages forces you to engage with the structure of the tool you're using, Google and Stack Overflow do not.

[rswail]

The issue is that when we hire skilled craftsmen or engineers, we expect them to be familiar with and capable of using the tools of their craft.

You wouldn't hire a carpenter who didn't know how to use a hammer, why do we expect so called "software engineers" to be handheld through using a basic tool like git, which is entirely based on simple structures like a DAG, immutable hashes and pointers?