So I think what's happening is that there are people here who have maybe been programming longer than you have. And we remember when professional programs might be written in BASIC and sold on 5.25 inch floppies. On machines with no /usr/local or PATH. And then we programmed PCs using Borland or Symantec or whatever IDE and there was no /usr/local or (usually) PATH to be concerned about. And we programmed MacOS before it was Unix based using Think C or CodeWarrior and there was no /usr/local or PATH or even a CLI.
And so when CLIs became popular with (broadly speaking) the early growth of the internet, we became more familiar with /usr/local and PATH (we probably had some exposure to these already). So while yes, these are found in most modern systems, we see these things as details. PATH simply doesn't feel "fundamental" to me because I've written exactly the same kind of code in environments where PATH is used and where it doesn't even exist as a concept.
Of course, what is "fundamental" is rather a judgment call, and your perspective makes it so that these are fundamental for you.
I won't defend the original post, particularly wrt nonsense like adding node to a browser. But I do think different perspectives are at play here, and disagreement on either side does not reflect intellectual laziness or people who should be laughed out of the room.
I started with BASIC on a second-hand VIC20, and then onto assembler on an 80286 running DOS. So I've been there.
I define "fundamental" as something thats in wide use and deployment in actively running systems. Like $PATH being in every operating system used today and /usr/local/bin on every linux distribution running on literally hundreds of millions of servers globally, right now.
And the requirement of understanding these are part of what's holding back the author of the article from not having a running ruby, pip and node.js
And so when CLIs became popular with (broadly speaking) the early growth of the internet, we became more familiar with /usr/local and PATH (we probably had some exposure to these already). So while yes, these are found in most modern systems, we see these things as details. PATH simply doesn't feel "fundamental" to me because I've written exactly the same kind of code in environments where PATH is used and where it doesn't even exist as a concept.
Of course, what is "fundamental" is rather a judgment call, and your perspective makes it so that these are fundamental for you.
I won't defend the original post, particularly wrt nonsense like adding node to a browser. But I do think different perspectives are at play here, and disagreement on either side does not reflect intellectual laziness or people who should be laughed out of the room.