if i could sum things up, basically the author views the actual research/prototyping as the largest value the students can provide as opposed to becoming skille

if i could sum things up, basically the author views the actual research/prototyping as the largest value the students can provide as opposed to becoming skilled systems programmers, i think it makes a lot of sense. a lot of counter-arguments seem to be in favor of putting those students through their paces in a bootcamp style of fashion where they struggle and learn about the intricacies and nuances of command line tools and development environments before they actually start writing programs, also a fair argument. however, i see the two arguments as orthogonal, his goal is to produce research scientists that discover new algorithms and new areas of research, not software engineers that work necessarily at twitter or facebook, etc. for the author, i suggest using some tools for building reproducible development environments like vagrant (mac os x). for things like command line option permutations and drudgery, perhaps creating some wrappers, scripts, or tools to automate some of these steps would be worth the investment and potentially a one time effort, it seems that copy/pasting scripts seemed to help. often times things are created out of necessity, frameworks or higher order tools evolve out of these things. at the end of the day, developing software should evolve, just like languages, where you have higher order languages that start to remove the lower level details and complexities so that you can focus on the bigger picture (e.g. java, springsource, jquery, cloud foundry, etc). for the record, i went through all the bullshittery at one point in my career, and don't regret any of the countless, mind-numbing hours spent trying to figure things out, but i don't work in the field of direct research.