When he saw that I couldn't open the door I asked him what the trick was he said, in a tone of voice that made it sound like this was obviously something everyone should know, you need to pull the door before pushing it. The door was wedged such that the easiest way to open the door was to pull the door as tightly shut as possible and then immediately shove the door open. This friend, since he grew up in that house, thought this was obvious, apparently not realizing that it's not normal to have to try to close a door extra hard to open it.

Instructive resources cannot assume the user has prior knowledge of all the neighbouring issues of the task at hand

The most popular static site generator, Jekyll, may have the best documentation pages of the lot. And yet, it still puts a bunch of technical language front-and-center, on the project’s home page: Jekyll’s core message, “Get up and running in seconds” This is developer-talk, because static site generators are tools made by developers for themselves and their peers.

Written inPython, Cython

It'd be a hell of a lot easier to contribute to open source projects if step 0 wasn't "spend 8 hours configuring environment to build"

figging

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.

okay how about ruby? oh I have old ruby , hmmm , try to install new ruby, seems to run, but it can't find certain gems or something. oh and this other ruby thing I was using is now broken ? why do I have to install this stuff globally? You don't but there are several magic spells you must execute and runes you must set in the rigtt places.

every time I mentor a new learner this is the number one sticking point

The biggest barriers to coding are technical complexity around processes like collaboration and deployment, and social obstacles like gatekeeping and exclusion — so that's what we've got to fix

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.

Get up and running in seconds.

build easy from source code

the ghcjs compiler. But it was a real pain, I Haskell but it's just getting it to install and run and compile, it's just kind of a nightmare