programming is one giant mess

I'm just an amateur programmer.  I have no trouble understanding programming languages though.  In fact I think I understand them better than most.  Languages are just rules and I am very good at building a correct mental model and logically organizing everything. 

What is extremely hard for me to understand is everything besides programming itself, meaning everything that comes after writing the source code.  Getting shit to run is very hard.  No one has laid out all the rules in one place.  Compiling, linking, assembling and this crap just 'works', unless of course it doesn't work in which case it's time to learn a new rule that you never heard of before.  You have different OSes, different hardware, different libraries, different everything each with their own standards and incompatibilities.  And you can't just decide to figure it all out and make one big mental model because the information you need is - in one way or another - almost secret;  the information is either locked up in closed source, or is in documentation that you have no idea how to find, or maybe it just plain doesn't exist.

I know something is wrong because part of my brain believes I should just say 'fuck it' start all over from the bottom up; program in assembly (intimidating as it may be, it is just a language) and slowly build all the abstractions I'm used to on top of that.  I know that is stupid though, but it sums up my frustrations.

Okay, so how many people can relate to this?  And - dare I ask - is there a way to find any of this information laid out in one place?

80% of programming these days is getting fucking implementations to work.

it's that horribly shitty balance, between writing your own implementation, or using existing implementations

if you write your own implementation, you might end up "re-inventing the wheel".

if you try to use an existing implementation, you have to fuck about trying to learn how to use the bugger, and tackling mandatorily shitty documentation

of course, if your project is to set out and implement a better version of something, re-inventing the wheel is what you want to do. but most of the time, you just want to get shit done. so this whole "do I spend a week learning how to use this fucking thing, only to find out it doesn't do what I want it to do/it is buggy, or do I spend a week implementing it myself, bug testing, etc.?"


AND THEN

if you want to use a language like Common Lisp, holy fuck, be prepared for lots of time and effort getting implementations to work before and during actually writing code


STOP BEFORE YOUR HEAD EXPLODES