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.
This is the prime example I use to illustrate implicit step zero.
Written inPython, Cython
Is this accurate? I don't have a lot of firsthand experience with data science stuff, but usually when looking just past surface-level you find that some Python package is really a shell around some native binary core implemented in e.g. C (or Fortran?).
When I at the repos for spaCy and its assistant Thinc, GitHub's language analysis shows that it's pretty much Python. Is there something lurking in the shadows that I'm not seeing? Or does this mean that if someone cloned spaCy and Thinc and wrote it in JS, then the subset of data scientists whose work can be done with those two packages (and whatever datavis generators they use) will benefit from the faster runtime and the the elimination of figging and other setup?
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"
I call this implicit step zero.
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.
Agreed. NodeJS is developer tooling. It's well past the time where we should have started packaging up apps/utilities that are written in JS so that they can run directly in* the browser—instead of shamelessly targeting NodeJS's non-standard APIs (on the off-chance everyone in your audience is a technical user and/or already has it installed).
This is exactly the crusade I've been on (intermittently) when I've had the resources (time/opportunity) to work on it.
Eliminate implicit step zero from software development. Make your projects' meta-tooling accessible to all potential contributors.
* And I do mean "in the browser"—not "on a server somewhere that you are able to use your browser to access, à la modern SaaS/PaaS"
Get up and running in seconds.
... assuming you're a Rubyist and you have gem and ruby installed.
build easy from source code
That's the explicit goal of triplescripts.org in its early stage—eliminating "implicit step 0" from software development.
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