Wonderful! Remember those words when you encounter a program that "encourages" you to master quantum physics, tort law for interstate commerce, and accounting for mergers and acquisitions before you're allowed to use it.
It's easy to Google "how do I compile this?" or "how do I install X program?" and get results. It is not, however, easy to Google "How do I use the Hartree-Fock approximation on toluene?"
Remember: the internet was built by computer users. We have some of the most detailed documentation and most accessible learning materials of any discipline. The same cannot be said of computational chemistry, quantum physics, systems metabolomics, ...
Ironically, the top result for "How do I use the Hartree-Fock approximation on toluene" is now your comment saying this thread is now the top result! [1]
No. Learning about configure, make and make install is more like learning basic arithmetic than quantum mechanics. And I certainly wouldn't begrudge a program having basic arithmetic as a prerequisite!
Of course I don't begrudge a program having basic category theory as a prerequisite either (turns out the very basics are actually very simple!) so maybe I'm not truly representative.
But it never works the first time, and then you have to figure out how to install this libsdl that's missing
And no, packaging name is a crapfest, between Debian based and RPM based, they all bring me to tears
Go on, try to install libsdl in Fedora. Oh, you see, there it is called SDL. And then you install it and it doesn't work, because you need the dev version. Or devel. Or maybe it's consolidated in a package with a different name. Or maybe it's split in 2 packages and that thing you need is in some god-forsaken package like libfoo-extras-nooneneedsthis-promise
The last time I used make was when I was in school, about 10 years ago. I don't think I've ever used configure. The last time I used arithmetic was... every day. To me, make is closer to quantum mechanics than arithmetic.
I also dabbled in Haskell. Honestly, I struggled. There's a distinct possibility that I'm not that smart, but if I'm not, then there are a lot of people that aren't.
If there is anything I have learned in life, I am pants on head retarded, but so is pretty much everyone else, except for like 1 in 10 million people who must cry at night knowing everyone else is a dumb monkey, who got the combined benefits of born into upper middle class living for security + untroubled childhood + high iq + passion for learning taught early on + ambition + connections.
Okay, maybe arithmetic is too basic. But it certainly isn't beyond basic trig! I bet you don't use trig daily, but it's hardly unreasonable for you to need to know what sin and cos do.
The first time I ran into the whole configure and make system, I just looked at the INSTALL file and followed the instructions. It was actually easier than some GUI stuff I had to do because I could basically copy the commands verbatim instead of having to look through a bunch of complicated screenshots.
It also took me a little bit of effort to get used to Haskell. But once I did, it was great. It really is a magical language; it combines all the benefits you normally hear about with a unique sort of expressiveness I haven't found in any other languages (even close ones, like OCaml, don't quite cut it, although they are awesome in their own ways).
The real breakthrough for me was implementing a simple Scheme interpreter in Haskell. There is a tutorial [1] that explains exactly how to do this; I found it very helpful. However, I am a little leery of suggesting it now because the code there doesn't always follow best practices. It's great for getting the right mindset, but you should probably not carry all the exact techniques over to your real code.
if this metaphor is still in terms of the general populace, then expecting people to understand how sin and cos work to use something is definitely too high of a bar. if you're lucky they might remember sin and cos as a magic button that changes whatever number they put in on their ti83.
Getting some piece of FOSS to work on a VPS many years ago was how I got started learning GNU/Linux. I couldn't be more grateful for the pitfalls and minor struggle I had before I could get whatever it was working.
The two also don't compare. Quantum physics is different and more complex than ./configure && make && sudo make install. Also, the user doesn't have to learn any of this and can just make a "donation" if they prefer.
