That or greasemonkey scripts. Though sometimes I read their source and it makes me feel better about my job security.

$PATH is complicated and scary for most beginners, just as math can be scary for many kids, especially if they don't have a good teacher. Do we say we don't want kids learning math? No, we need to be better teachers. There are so many people with great ambitions and ideas who just need good guidance. Let's help them, not dismiss them.

>Do we say we don't want kids learning math?

No, but I also don't want them being paid for their efforts to prove the Riemann hypothesis using only an abacus.

>we need to be better teachers

According to google there are about 1,040,000 results for 'what is "$PATH"?'. I feel like one or more of those is probably a pretty good resource.

I’m a programmer but I still to Google how to edit the PATH in Windows. This is not a matter of teaching, it’s a matter of laziness. Open Google and figure it out. This is not math. You don’t need to understand why. You follow the tutorial and go on with your life. You’ll understand why PATH matters when you’ll need to. And before you reply with: then why not abstracting this stuff? That’s because most technical people don’t mind, and they know that defaults don’t always apply. Just like accounting software doesn’t explain every single acronym. It targets a different audience.

What's with the vitriol? The person who wrote this is active in the current thread.

The vitriol, if any, comes from eventually having to use products created by programmers without a shred of curiosity, expect everything handed to them, and do the bare minimum to create a semblance of working products. How many times have you used a website/app and it works so bad that you want to hit the programmer who wrote it? Frankly, “why do I need to figure out what PATH means” is shockingly non-curious even among those.

Exactly this. It's frustrating reading this article and the author's comments in this thread as it's apparent that they don't want to put the smallest amount of effort into learning something that is by its nature complicated.

They don't want to have to google what $PATH does, they want the browser to come with an IDE (and massively ramping up its complexity because why?) instead of actually downloading an IDE.

The author has weirdly treated the problem of not knowing something as that it is wrong that they need to know it.

> The author has weirdly treated the problem of not knowing something as that it is wrong that they need to know it.

Yes, that’s TFA in a nutshell.

The title is deceptively “normal” though, so lots of people are making good faith attempts at answering the question. Except cloud9, code-server or whatever aren’t what TFA asks for, since you still need to understand what’s going on in the server to use them effectively, you’re only offloading storage and computations to a remote machine.

It could also come from having spent thousands of hours dealing with issues created by this type of person.

There's nothing wrong with being new to coding, not knowing things, and making mistakes - it's how we learn - but when you start your article with list of things that you couldn't be bothered to do a web search for, proudly proclaiming your ignorance and unwillingness to learn and expecting me to do your thinking for you, I don't have much interest in being nice and/or trying to teach you stuff.

Yes, there’s substantial overlap between this group and the group who create “does not work (EOM)” issues I expressed immense frustration over the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25758884

This is not an excuse for being a dick.

I know right. The person who posted this article should have hit up a search engine before wasting all of our time. Very dickish behaviour.

Truly fantastic dialogue