There’s an abyss to cross between using an app and modifying it with code by calling APIs. The user has to switch to a whole other paradigm including setting up a development environment. Consequently, few users take the step from using a tool to customizing or making their own tools.

For open source projects, the difficulty of getting the project to build at all is a huge hurdle for potential contributors.

My side projects from 2012-2017 cannot be built or ran because of dependencies. My jsbin repo with lots of experiments cannot be ran anymore. But I have the sqlite database.I forgot to pin dependencies when I was working. It would take a lot of trial and error and effort to get back to where I was.

curious developers can no longer build software without scaling mountains

It is no longer easy to build software

there's no infrastructure to guide them step by step through what the code does and in what order

When you want to show someone a single function or a quick experiment, it's too much to ask them to install a bunch of command line crap.

Not a web developer? Sucks to be you. The vast majority of the static site generator tools out there are run from the command line, powered by things you've never heard of like Node, Grunt, or Babel.

I spend an inordinate amount of time helping the kids set up their build environments

When the designer on the team, who also writes CSS, went to go make changes, it was a lot harder for them to implement them. They had to figure out which file to look in, open up command line, run a build step, check that it worked as expected, and then deploy the code.

I hate npm so much. I had a situation where I couldn't work on a project because I couldn't get the dev environment running locally.

This post is a narrative rant (in the same vein of Dan Luu's "Everything is Broken" post) about my problems one afternoon getting a Fancy New Programming Language to work on my laptop.

We weren't able to compile this code

Some people are extremely gifted mathematicians with incredible talent for algorithmic thinking, yet can be totally shut down by build configuration bullshit.

The repo was 3 years old. Surely it wouldn't be that hard to get running again? Ha!Here's what went well.Installing Android Studio. I remember when this was a chore - but I just installed the Flatpak, opened it, and let it update.Cloning the repo. Again, simple.Importing the project. Couple of clicks. Done.Then it all went to hell.

My husband reviews papers. He works a 40h/wk industry job; he reviews papers on Saturday mornings when I talk to other people or do personal projects, pretty much out of the goodness of his heart. There is no way he would ever have time to download the required third party libraries for the average paper in his field, let alone figure out how to build and run it.

I was trying to make it work with Python 2.7 but, after installing the required packages successfully I get the following error:

Cidraque · 2016-Oct-23 Only linux? :( Matt Zucker · 2016-Oct-23 It should work on any system where you can install Python and the requirements, including windows.

Hi there, I can't run the program, it gives me this output and I can't solve the problem by myself

I think I tried to install Jekyll once and I had the wrong version of Ruby so I gave up

[Note: I am doing edits directly in dist/source-map.js because I did not want to spend time figuring out the build process]

My first experience with Scheme involved trying and failing to install multiple Scheme distributions because I couldn’t get all the dependencies to work.

Thereafter, I would need to build an executable, which, depending on the libraries upon which the project relies could be anything from straightforward to painful.

almost every other time I've had the misfortune of compiling a c(++) application from scratch it's gone wildly wrong with the most undiagnose-able wall of error messages I've ever seen (and often I never manyage to figure it out even after over a day of trying because C developers insist on using some of the most obtuse build systems conceivable)

The amount of boilerplate and number of dependencies involved in setting up a web development project has exploded over the past decade or so. If you browse through the various websites that are writing about web development you get the impression that it requires an overwhelming amount of dependencies, tools, and packages.

Reading through your link I caught myself thinking if I would put up with all those boilerplate nix steps just to add a new page to the site.

With Go, I can download any random code from at least 2018, and do this: go build and it just works. all the needed packages are automatically downloaded and built, and fast. same process for Rust and even Python to an extent. my understanding is C++ has never had a process like this, and its up to each developer to streamline this process on their own. if thats no longer the case, I am happy to hear it. I worked on C/C++ code for years, and at least 1/3 of my development time was wasted on tooling and build issues.

So, immediately I was prevented from just doing the bare minimum I hope to expect from JS applications: npm install npm run

C/C++ support cross-compiling through a painful process of setting up an entire compilation environment for the target.

go sample from A gallery of interesting Jupyter Notebooks. Pick five. Try to run them. Try to install the stuff needed to run them. Weep in despair.

I tried writing a serious-looking research paper about the bug and my proposed fix, but I lost a series of pitched battles against Pytorch and biblatex

it's like all right someone built an app that's pretty cool now let me go set up my ide let me go download all these packages what's the stack they're using

Once I was *attempting* (Igave up) to install an application and the first tutorial allowed mea choice of 6 ways to install something and none worked.

Our informants recognized this as a general problem with tu-torials: “There’s an implicit assumption about the environment”(I5) and “many tutorials assume you have things like a workingdatabase” (I4). If tutorials “were all written with *less* assumptionsand were more comprehensive that would be great

After 10 years of industry and teaching nearly 1000 students various software engineering courses, including a specialized course on DevOps, I saw one common problem that has not gotten better. It was amazing to see how difficult and widespread the simple problem of installing and configuring software tools and dependencies was for everyone.

I could port it to Hugo or Jekyll but I think the end result would make it harder to use, not simpler.

Checking your own repos on a new computer is one thing… inheriting someone else’s project and running it on your machine in the node ecosystem is very rough.

But my experience with build systems (not just Javascript build systems!), is that if you have a 5-year-old site, often it’s a huge pain to get the site built again.

I probably spend 50% of my time trying to figure out why the build system is breaking, again.

Having purchased to a new laptop, I find myself having to install additional software to compile

igal needs Perl to run and it also relies on a few other programs that come standard with most Linux distributions.

Six months passes and while you had almost forgotten about your little project, you now have got some new ideas that could make it even better. The project also has a few open issues and feature requests that you can take care of. So you come back to it. “Let’s start”, you whispered to yourself with excitement. You run npm install in your terminal like an innocent man and switch to your browser to scroll on Twitter while you are waiting for the dependencies to be installed. Moments later you return to your terminal and see… an error!

The migration would not be complete without calling out that I was unable to build the Mastodon code base on our new primary Puma HTTP server.

But. I somehow changed-ish laptop, and you know the problem where you change laptop and suddenly you lose access to a few things? Yes. That's one of my problems. This site was using nini to statically generate pages and interconnect them with backlinks, and it's great. But I figured I'll keep it to simple html pages that don't need any compilation for now, so that when I change this laptop, I'll still be able to publish without having to install anything.

IMO: one of the biggest problems in modern softwaredevelopment• Code breaks constantly, even if it doesn’t change• Huge cause of reliability issues and time wasted• This is somehow accepted as normal

We next made two attempts to buildeach system. This often required edit-ing makefiles and finding and in-stalling specific operating system andcompiler versions, and external librar-ies.

Several hurdles must becleared to replicate computer systemsresearch. Correct versions of sourcecode, input data, operating systems,compilers, and libraries must be avail-able, and the code itself must build

It's wild that you have to set up Docker to contribute to 600 characters of JavaScript.

Many research projects are publicly available but rarely useddue to the difficulty of building and installing them

Some of my ruby, nodejs and python projects no longer run due to dependencies not being pinned at creation time.

I decided to start with a fresh install of Python 2.7. First surprise: no C compiler.

There has been significant pressure for scientists to make their code open, but this is not enough. Even if I hired the only postdoc who can get the code to work, she might have forgotten the exact details of how an experiment was run. Or she might not know about a critical dependency on an obsolete version of a library.

over the seven years of the project, I ended upspending a lot of time catching up with dependencies. Newreleases of NumPy and matplotlib made my code collapse,and the increasing complexity of Python installations addedanother dose of instability. When I got a new computer in2013 and installed the then-current versions of everything,some of my scripts no longer worked and, worse, oneof them produced different results. Since then, softwarecollapse has become an increasingly serious issue for mywork. NumPy 1.9 caused the collapse of my MolecularModelling Toolkit, and it seems hardly worth doing muchabout it because the upcoming end of support for Python 2in 2020 will be the final death blow.

Finally, software is hard to work with. Forgetmaking research reproducible, it is hard enough touse it 6 months later.

if you’re a beginner you can use Replit which allows you to program through your browser without installing anything on your machine

We never got there. We never distributed the source code to a working web browser, more importantly, to the web browser that people were actually using. We didn't release the source code to the most-previous-release of Netscape Navigator: instead, we released what we had at the time, which had a number of incomplete features, and lots and lots of bugs.

It's also hard to share this workflow with someone non-technical. I have to setup and maintain the correct environment on their machine

When you’re building developer tools, if the officially supported developer environment doesn’t work for people in some way, they build their own approach.

It took me an hour to rewrite my ui code and two days to get it to compile. The clojurescript version I started with miscompiles rum. Older clojurescript versions worked with debug builds but failed with optimizations enabled, claiming that cljs.react was not defined despite it being listed in rum's dependencies. I eventually ended up with a combination of versions where compiling using cljs.build.api works but passing the same arguments at the command line doesn't.

having to go through all the trouble of compiling and building a custom extension

other people’s toolchains are absolutely inscrutable from the outside. Even getting started is touchy. Last month, I had to install a package manager to install a package manager.

preventing the build from bitrotting would probably require a full-time maintainer in the long run

Your personal dev environment travels with you no matter which device you use

I have one Gatsby site left that I haven't touched in years, I doubt it will get past npm install.

Built using Go, Hugo is incredibly fast at building large sites, has an active community, and is easily installable on a variety of operating systems. In our early discovery work, we found that Hugo would build our docs content in mere seconds.

I have seen experienced developers pull their hair out for a day or more trying to get a basic build system working, or to import a simple module.

every time i run npm install i am prepared to embark on a bunch of side missions.

This is a problem with all kinds of programming for new learners - actually writing some code is easy. But getting a development environment configured to actually allow you to start writing that code requires a ton of tacit knowledge.

I can write JS and TypeScript easily enough but when I start a new project I'm always fighting the tooling for at least half an hour before I can get going.

I just want to try this C++, download, unzip, oh it's windows so .project file. Fine, redo on windows , oh it's 3 versions of vstuido old and says it wants to upgrade , okay. Hmm errors. Try to fix. Now it's getting linking error.

I woke up realizing one of the computers I use isn't set up to build and I wished I could use it to build and release the new version

The thrill of getting "hello world" on the screen in Symbian/S60 is not something I'll ever forget. Took ages of battling CodeWarrior and I think even a simple app was something like 6 files

local development environments (at least for the languages I work with, Python and JavaScript) break ALL THE TIME

Furthermore, its release philosophy is supposed to avoid what I call “the problem with Python”: your code stops working if you don’t actively keep up with the latest version of the language.

Requirements: Ruby and Bundler should be installed.

But… on installing node.js you’re greeted with this screen (wtf is user/local/bin in $path?), and left to fire up the command line.

An incomplete list of things I’ve tried and failed to do

How to Contribute to this Site You will need Docker.

I’m not spending 30 minutes just figuring out how to compile it, I’ll pass

front-end dumpster fires, where nothing that is over 18 months old, can build, compile or get support anymore. In my day job, I inherit "fun" tasks as 'get this thing someone glued together with webpack4 and frontend-du-jour to work with webpack5 in 2022

I tried building Firefox once but I wasn't able to, it's slightly outside of my competences at the moment

Don’t read the code before learning to build the project. Too often, I see people get bogged down trying to understand the source code of a project before they’ve learned how to build it. For me, part of that learning process is experimenting and breaking things, and its hard to experiment and break a software project without being able to build it.

I am struggling to think of any open source project of any size beyond small NPM packages that I've experienced that do not have an arcane build system. At least all of the ones I've encountered have been incredibly obtuse, to the point that I've mostly just given up.

having to install 12gb xcode so i can convert my chrome extension to safari. or my local env/build system stop working because i update from catalina to big sur

You will need a JVM installed with appropriate enviornment settings (JAVA_HOME, etc) along with Maven 2.x+. You will also need Babel as well as SIMILE Butterfly. Butterfly should be installed in a peer directory to Backstage, like

I have been personally and my whole professional life on Linux for 15y. And I have the exact same feeling when I have to compile something.The waste of time to compile anything is staggering. And more often than not I give up on failure after 2h.

Get up and running in seconds.

hard to get into

he wants to dabble in programming, but MySQL isn’t compatible with his laptop.

Editing a list of dependencies or wrangling with package managers doesn’t sound too bad

Open and run .\Service\PowerFxService.sln in VS2019. Be sure you're running in VS2019 (not an earlier version)

With that in mind, I'm trying something new, the guided tour for Mu. Ironically, it atomizes my previous docs by linking repeatedly into anchors in the middle of pages. Proceed if you dare.

I do wonder if this will eventually become a burden in the future when Node inevitably falls out of favor.

since when have I enjoyed webpack

looks like I need a full blown Ruby environment. No thanks!

I no longer know how it works. I don't care to maintain it. It needs big changes to handle something like embedding a Jupyter notebook. And it depends on Python 2.6(!).With hundreds of pages, and its own custom URL layout that I don't want to break, I dread migrating

if you have an older version of node/npm I can't guarantee, that the following scripts will work correctly

As with browsers

If you want to assemble it, you must download the Netwide Assembler