[reaperducer]

they may just be misunderstanding or have mis-spoken/written

90% of the tech rant blog spam on HN is people who don't fully understand the tool they're using.

Something doesn't work the way they expect for their particular project or their specific need, and they blather on about how bad it is.

When the reality is that these things are often done for a reason, but the author's myopia prevents him from understanding that there are other people doing other things in the world.

[Apocryphon]

It could certainly be mitigated if the creator of the software published less opaque documentation about it.

[dalemyers]

Absolutely. I spent forever reverse engineering the format to write a Python parser (https://github.com/microsoft/xcodeproj). It covers the projects I need it to (one in particular is very complex, probably in the top 100 most complex ones out there - I'm sure you can figure out which from my profile). However, there are plenty of areas I had to guess. And this is just for reading, no writing support has been added at this point.

[dalemyers]

This is 100% true, but it's also one of the more difficult things in life to understand. It's one thing to know that other people have other experiences and needs, but it's another to really constantly feel that.

I'd like to see more assumption of positive intent on here, but it's definitely a hard task. I hope I didn't offend the original author here. I tried to ensure that I explained without chastising.