“I hate almost all software” — Ryan Dahl
I've been tempted to write rants like this before. Ryan's point seems particularly centered around Unix, which makes sense. My experience of trying to get stuff done in Unix has taught me that it is a really powerful, extremely well-thought-out way to <i>waste my fucking time.</i><p>All of it. Down the fucking toilet, and for stuff I don't give a shit about. Every single goddamn thing I try to accomplish while setting up a server involves a minimum of 1 hour of googling and tinkering. Installing PHP? Did you install it the <i>right way</i>? Did you install the special packages that make it secure and not mastadon slow? You want to create a daemon process? Hope you found the right guide! Setting up a mail sever? Kill yourself.<p>For some people, this is not the case. They have spent multiple decades breathing in the Unix environment, and are quite good at guessing how the other guy probably designed his system. And they don't mind spending the majority of their productive hours tinkering with this stuff. But I don't have time. I don't care. I don't have time to read your 20-page manual/treatise on a utility that doesn't explain how to actually use the thing until page 17. I don't want to figure out why your project doesn't build on my machine because I'm missing some library that you need even though I have it installed but some bash variable isn't set and blah blah blah blah.<p>The problem with Unix is that it doesn't have a concept of a user. It was not designed that way. It was designed for the people who programmed it. Other pieces were designed for the people who programmed them. If you are using a piece that you built, then you are a user. Otherwise you are a troublesome interloper, and the system is simply waiting in a corner, wishing you would go away.<p>And yet...we put up with it. Because there isn't a better option. Because it's our job. Because we'd rather just bull through and get things done than spend an infinite amount of time fixing something that isn't fixable. Life sucks, but NodeJS is pretty cool.