I think many developer tools - and perhaps Unix-style tools in particular - suffer from this problem of skipping past concepts to syntax. There's an inherent expectation that you aren't a user who wants just the "shallow" common-case uses, but instead are going to go through a rite of passage where you learn the ins and outs of all the concepts the tool uses, make it part of your daily life, and piece it together with the other small powerful tools into some conglomeration that solves your problem.
This is great for developers, but bad for end-users, as a lot of users will run away before learning new concepts(they're busy enough already), while others will take a macho posturing attitude towards it and look down on the people who ran away. The community gets polarized. Git exemplifies this kind of thing, for better or for worse.
It's not a huge surprise that so many developers have switched from Linux to OSX, since the latter has made many more provisions towards the newbie end-user; it indicates that most developers don't want to take on this kind of burden, at least not all the time.
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I think many developer tools - and perhaps Unix-style tools in particular - suffer from this problem of skipping past concepts to syntax. There's an inherent expectation that you aren't a user who wants just the "shallow" common-case uses, but instead are going to go through a rite of passage where you learn the ins and outs of all the concepts the tool uses, make it part of your daily life, and piece it together with the other small powerful tools into some conglomeration that solves your problem.
This is great for developers, but bad for end-users, as a lot of users will run away before learning new concepts(they're busy enough already), while others will take a macho posturing attitude towards it and look down on the people who ran away. The community gets polarized. Git exemplifies this kind of thing, for better or for worse.
It's not a huge surprise that so many developers have switched from Linux to OSX, since the latter has made many more provisions towards the newbie end-user; it indicates that most developers don't want to take on this kind of burden, at least not all the time.