I am pretty frustrated by build processes of modern day applications. Wanted to give this a quick spin, but looking at the installation instructions all I see is compilers, optimizers, minifiers, interpreters, package managers, package-package managers, dependency systems and then, maybe then, you pray to your configuration-God that everything clicks together and runs on your system.
I was about to ask why isn't there a simple, unified build tool for ANYTHING, but I think that is what got us here in the first place...
It's the technological singularity. Thanks to the various "code academy" initiatives going on around the world, there is a growing middle area--between software developers and users--of scripters, people who plug components together but don't do a lot of greenfield programming.
It used to be that being a scripter was a stepping stone on the way to developers, mostly because back then scripting could only get you so far. Now, you can apparently make an entire career being a scripter, if said code academies are correct in the promise that they can find you a job with the extremely shallow curriculum I've seen them provide.
This isn't a bad thing, it's pretty amazing that it doesn't take a decade of dedicated study to do so much anymore. It's just that in our current culture we lump them in with developers because they are clearly more than just users. We still expect a set of resources put into a Github repository to have a significant amount of new programming, rather than just being glue code between a few commonly available libraries. But that's more of a problem of our lack of ability to differentiate between large, greenfield projects and small, configuration-oriented projects at-a-glance than it is a problem of programming being "too easy".
Though, if we recast scripters as users instead of developers, then it's a terrible thing. It means that the real software developers of the world have written a bunch of software with a really, really shitty user interface.
Are you serious? "brew/apt-get these packages", many of which you'll probably have already, is so much better than the way it used to be (you'd have a tarball with a configure file if you were lucky, and if you were very lucky it would work).
I was about to ask why isn't there a simple, unified build tool for ANYTHING, but I think that is what got us here in the first place...