this is bad for the ecosystem of software and also culture as a whole

this might sound like a weird claim if you've a) never tried to pull a large software project off a website and build it from scratch, or b) do that all the time. but

it's a problem because it kind of undermines the concept of open source in a pretty basic way. for a lot of software, grabbing the thing and making it do what you want involves an indefinite amount of overcomplicated bullshit as you try to install the right versions of a bunch of dependencies you've never heard of and decipher output from an idiosyncratic build system. you can't just get in there and experiment

which pushes people away from contributing, especially if they have skillsets outside core programmer stuff

i think typically most projects don't see this as an issue, because nobody on the team has a problem with it, and if it gets brought up there are always historical reasons for why it's this way, and it's not THAT complicated, just follow the instructions dumbass,

@aeonofdiscord tbh I see this kind of "blindness to the perspective of the newbie" as both very difficult to avoid, but also a red flag if the project leadership clearly doesn't even make a basic effort.

@technomancy yeah def, i think this is such a widespread problem that it's not even anyone's fault as such. like there are clearly bigger factors causing this (bad tooling, for one)

@technomancy you can work around it and provide a good new-user experience out of the box but it takes effort and in most cases i don't think people see a compelling case for it

@aeonofdiscord there are so many examples of these cases where the experience for the newbie is just unbearably tedious in ways that it's literally nearly impossible for the project maintainers to even comprehend, because there are so many things that they just take for granted because they've been doing it so long they don't even realize they're doing it any more.

@technomancy @aeonofdiscord maybe we should normalize blowing away your development environment every few months and recreating it from scratch by carefully following your own project documentation lol