Ah. I was picturing downloading pre-autotools C programs. You'd ftp a tar file, find build notes or hopefully a Makefile... and watch the compiler errors go by. Seemed like everything was always written for some version of unix other than the one you had, or for a somehow different C compiler. Then you'd work the error list, translating library and system calls, tweaking C constructs. Eventually, hopefully, you could get it to compile, and maybe not segfault. Usually.

Later on, you'd hope the author created a `make.yourunix` or `INSTALL.yourunix` or README section for your unix, and that was nice. Then being able to simply say `./configure; make` and have it mostly just work... magic wonderful. Then basically "$ gimme name-of-the-thing", first for Perl, and then more and more others, eventually even python (but not C) - next level. And now we're at "Minion, build me an X", with an "and install whatever it is we need" implicit, quiet. That's, just, wow.

So from Objective-C and proto-C++ C-with-types, created hoping software might someday, maybe, be reused like hardware components... to now? So very living that dream.