Yeah, that was so strange. The submitter so titled it. I'm sure somebody from HN will come along and fix it soon enough.. But I can't comprehend how anyone gets that from the post.

HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22997134

Ah, from OP:

Sadly, I think the current state of “modern” web development reverses that principle. Developer efficiency is prized above all else.

Explains something, at least. Still strange to make it the title.

User experience, even over developer experience, sums up the article, although I'm sure in FOC there will be a lot of "why not both" I strongly agree with this. I actually think environment and language should take the experience of the end user who the software is being developed for into account and encourage developers to build good software for user. possibly by encouraging good robust performant implementation by default

I think the conventional rhetoric about UX over DX actually impacts UX in the long run. So it feels short-sighted. If you take a long view of UX, I believe you naturally optimize for DX as well. Then again, thinking this way is what got me deep into my current yak-shave 😄

You mean bad DX leading the software to crystallize in some suboptimal form?

Yeah, partly. Bad DX may make more things difficult and so make feature requests seem harder. But the more urgent part for me: bad DX can stunt potential collaborators in the 'user' stage of development for a tool. Then you get feature requests like, "can you add a preference for this so that I don't have to put up with your crappy build+install process to modify it for myself?" which further complicate the codebase. The eco-system for Vim (and probably other text editors) shows this problem so much. You start out with a text editor that's easy to build. As it gets harder to build you get rc (settings) files, then turing-complete rc files, then plugin architectures for rc files, then plugins for plugins. And all this time people are getting increasingly discouraged from just hacking on the editor to learn how to help themselves in ways others may not have anticipated. Here's a concrete example: https://mastodon.social/@akkartik/103994830568601931