Even after decades of experience, this stuff can still be extremely frustrating. I remember my first experience trying out Go, fighting with the GOPATH and GOROOT variables until I could figure out how to get things installed properly.

I recently had this experience as well, it was a good reminder about the fundamental obstacles. Although after years, we're much better equipped to interpret error messages and search for answers than a novice. Also, google now vs pre-google. Answers are so easy to find now, it boggles the mind.

I'm a bit interested with your comment. Do we have 8 year olds playing around with environment variables in the OS? I'm curious because I never thought that could be possible

It was not uncommon to have to monkey with crap like that back in the DOS days, to do the most basic things. I vaguely remember having to fool around with autoexec.bat and play with virtual and extended memory settings to try and get Raptor: Call of the Shadows, Wolfenstein 3D or Warcraft: Orcs and Humans to load up and use the right colors on the family 586, when I was much too young to be playing such games - or really tweaking environment variables.

Yea, having to hack your autoexec.bat and config.sys files to get your games to work was definitely a formative experience :)

I remember having to muck about with autoexec.bat files when I was SIX (this was a quarter century ago) because our 386 desktop had enough memory to run either Windows 3.1 or the CD-ROM drive, but not both simultaneously. Granted, I was just copying instructions that my dad had written into a workbook, not writing the file myself.

That's likely a source of frustration. In class, professors and other students might assume you already knowing something as in indicator that you're passionate/interested and not knowing it means you're not. (A->B doesn't necessarily mean ~A->~B, right?).

Maybe, but the procedure is the same as for any other error you don't understand, copy paste the error message to a search engine and use the results to figure out what it means and how to fix it.

Which teaches you how to find other people's solutions to your problem- a valuable skill - but you miss out on building foundational troubleshooting skills.

But that kind of information should just be in the instructions for the assignment. It's a problem with the instructor, is what I'm getting at.