[rektide]

I want to improve & grow, get better at computing.

This idea of being good enough, embracing mediocre capabilities for life & only focusing on shirt term output forever is exactly the local minima this post is warning against. Selling yourself a compromised future, being a passive consumer of technology, is anathema to the greater objectives of life & computing, in my view.

Selling yourself on comprimise, swearing you have served yourself, also seems hollow when one is deliberately snubbing trying to raise themselves to a perch where they are capable of evaluating. The anti-elite pitch is easy because it doesnt even have to get good enough to assess the merits & values of the school of lifelong learning & struggles. As for your precious output, it might be totally different & better if you had opted to invest in yourself & see technology as less than a lever you know how to crank.

[kcb]

We build on the shoulders of giants and there's nothing wrong with that. The terminal is just one abstraction down of an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction. Not very impressive.

[rektide]

Linux disagrees with you. A process is a core thing to the OS, not just "another abstraction". The terminal is an extremely shallow/direct interface to the OS, in a way distinctly more clear & certain than most other abstractions.

There's no better way to see real truth in computing. The shell exposes the base truths of the OS abstraction directly: processes, environment variables, stdio, signals, pipes. This is the fundamental toolkit of computing, and what higher-level abstractions we see (from language's stdlibs, to things like Kafka or SQS queues) are better understood in terms of the base computing fundamentals. The base unix tools define a clear set of capabilities we should be familiar with, & to call them just another abstraction, to focus on our own local platforms, ignores the base root that all computing so far eminates from.

This abstraction-relativism you present is highly dangerous. Arguing we shouldn't care about anything because there are abstractions everywhere ignores a realer truth, that some abstractions have been around & underpin nearly all systems & likely will continue to do so. We're only barely starting to play around with alternative conceptions, in projects like Fuschia. But this is a rare, novel, & just-emerging break from our common frameworks of computing. One that would behoove people to gain some competency in.