Wait till you have to hand craft your algorithms because the off the shelf ones are too slow ;). In the end you can stand on the shoulders of giants all day, bu

Wait till you have to hand craft your algorithms because the off the shelf ones are too slow ;). In the end you can stand on the shoulders of giants all day, but until you actually sit down and write an SVM or even something more cutting edge like stacked deep autoencoders yourself, machine learning isn't "easy". In the end, libs are there for simpler use cases or educational purposes. Realistically, that's more than good enough for 90% of people. That being said, it's not impossible to learn. Oversimplifying the statistics, tuning, and work that goes in to these algorithms you're using though? Not a good idea.