Item — HN Reader

I'm really glad somebody has written this. I think it makes essential points and does it with undisputable examples and a sense of humor. Bravo.

I agree with the javascript examples; I had an even worse experience trying to set up a LAMP stack back as a teenager. It was a perfect storm of new problems and vague errors (which .conf file on my hard drive represents what's running on port 80? Did I screw up permissions? Is there something wrong in my php.ini? Did I install php as a module or a library? All I get is a timeout...). Today I know all the exact commands to debug the setup, but I wasted so many hours back then blindly struggling with something that could have been explained in minutes by more experienced people / software.

1 comments

I have no idea why your comment is at the bottom of the page. So many arguments in this comments section set up a straw man, claiming that the author is saying that nothing should ever be configured. Of course, it's not that you never need configuration, it's that you should have sane defaults for very common use cases.

If you hear about Linux and want to install it, for example, Googling "Linux" just takes you to the linux.com homepage. Last I checked, it contained no links to distros. This is the same situation. Someone's goal is to install a Linux distro or to use nvm, so you should make it easy for them to install a Linux distro or use nvm. Don't make people wade through complex instructions for a process that should be simple.

Most software solves problems. Why add complexity when someone wants to get something else done?