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I cannot agree more.

I also want to add that I hate these "project generators" such as create-react-app when I'm just getting started. (It's just an example: I'm glad I learned React long before its existence.) They create an opinionated folder structure with template files and preconfigured tools. I don't function well in this model: if I don't immediately have a high-level overview of what the created files do, why they are created this way, I just become uneasy at all this magic that I do not understand. Each time a new thing is introduced, I need a high-level introduction covering its purpose that relates to the concepts I already know. I'm not comfortable dealing with magical black boxes unless I have at least a rudimentary understanding of the main interface of that black box.

To put this back into the concrete example, it means that hypothetically if I were to be learning create-react-app from scratch, I would immediately begin to investigate the purposes of the tools that have been configured by it, like Babel and ESLint.




I think this way too and I think it's because I'm autistic. I don't WANT to clone a project in one click. I want to understand every tool well enough to create my OWN project that serves MY use cases.


I absolutely loathe those “frameworks“ with billion files in billion directories. If can't start with single file and build upon it - it is complete trash. Android projects with Gradle come to mind.


I'm doing the following approach:

1. Create new project.

2. Carefully inspect every file in the project. Remove everything non-essential from every file.

3. Repeat step 2, until things just don't work and find out why they don't work.

After that work is done, you'll be with few files which are somewhat easier to understand than the original state.

On my experience, people who create tools, usually have good built-in defaults, so you can actually delete almost everything.




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