[forgotmypw17]

I think it's about equally both.

[indigodaddy]

Not exactly a great look for the fig employees though is it?

[forgotmypw17]

Well, it was discovered in the process of developing Fig, and they posted it in their blog as a result. Where else?

You're right, it's not a great look for any project to post a criticism of another, largely unrelated project. But where else would they post it?

Posting it like this helps it get the exposure it needs. I think posting it to brew's bugtracker would just get it lost.

[actually_a_dog]

I wouldn’t even call it criticism. It’s a legitimate issue and a legitimate fix. That’s not criticism; that’s just called “software engineering.”

Now, had they submitted a pull request with a clearer instruction, that would truly be the bazaar functioning as intended.

[herpderperator]

The criticism of brew's instructions is warranted to be completely honest, they could certainly word that one sentence a little better. But the way I interpreted the parent comment is that it makes Fig employees appear less capable because they don't understand intricacies of the shell, but as I described in my other comment, not everyone has to be an expert of the shell. Brew is not a "power user" tool, it's a package manager for macOS. Instructions should be clear for all types of users.

[mschrage]

To clarify, a decent number of Fig users (not employees) have been running into this issue.

We host our answers to common support requests on Github Discussions!

[indigodaddy]

I meant that a multitude of employees had misunderstood the instructions. If you take a breath and think about what that first line is doing for a few seconds, you’d never put that into your profile.

[forgotmypw17]

I think the article says that they discovered the issue because of Fig users contacting them for support with it, not from Fig developers doing it themselves.

[herpderperator]

Not everyone has to be an expert on the shell to be good at their job.

[indigodaddy]

Shouldn’t a software engineer who lives in the Mac and/or *nix ecosystem, be competent in the shell? I understand that it’s not programming, but it just seems such a core and fundamental/base skill to understand this stuff.

I agree the instructions are not clear enough, however. “Run the following two commands, which adds the needful to your profile and current shell” or similar would be a better way to put it.

[aequitas]

"The terminal" can be really abstract or frightening (eg: you can remove all files without them going to the trash) to use even for programmers. I've had lots of colleagues that just copy-paste oneliners from a file without understanding what they do, to do their job and be fine with that.

> your profile and current shell

What is my profile in this case? What is the current shell? What even is a shell?

A better way would be to ask the user if they want this step to be done for them as part of the installation process. As first-time users will often have to install Brew just to get started on the learning curve of terminal usage.

[sundvor]

Or Win10 with WSL2, however I guess that can be covered as *nix .

I'll agree and further add that learning about the shell is essential knowledge building, just as touch typing is an essential skill to have, yet it's surprising how far one can get without.

Learned early on both of these will just make your life easier as a SWE.

[beermonster]

I know lots of software engineers that don’t even know what a shell is. Sadly.