If there is anything I have learned in life, I am pants on head retarded, but so is pretty much everyone else, except for like 1 in 10 million people who must cry at night knowing everyone else is a dumb monkey, who got the combined benefits of born into upper middle class living for security + untroubled childhood + high iq + passion for learning taught early on + ambition + connections.

Okay, maybe arithmetic is too basic. But it certainly isn't beyond basic trig! I bet you don't use trig daily, but it's hardly unreasonable for you to need to know what sin and cos do.

The first time I ran into the whole configure and make system, I just looked at the INSTALL file and followed the instructions. It was actually easier than some GUI stuff I had to do because I could basically copy the commands verbatim instead of having to look through a bunch of complicated screenshots.

It also took me a little bit of effort to get used to Haskell. But once I did, it was great. It really is a magical language; it combines all the benefits you normally hear about with a unique sort of expressiveness I haven't found in any other languages (even close ones, like OCaml, don't quite cut it, although they are awesome in their own ways).

The real breakthrough for me was implementing a simple Scheme interpreter in Haskell. There is a tutorial [1] that explains exactly how to do this; I found it very helpful. However, I am a little leery of suggesting it now because the code there doesn't always follow best practices. It's great for getting the right mindset, but you should probably not carry all the exact techniques over to your real code.

[1]: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H...

if this metaphor is still in terms of the general populace, then expecting people to understand how sin and cos work to use something is definitely too high of a bar. if you're lucky they might remember sin and cos as a magic button that changes whatever number they put in on their ti83.

In which case this model allows them to substitute money for an understanding of sin and cos.