[indigodaddy]

Shouldn’t a software engineer who lives in the Mac and/or *nix ecosystem, be competent in the shell? I understand that it’s not programming, but it just seems such a core and fundamental/base skill to understand this stuff.

I agree the instructions are not clear enough, however. “Run the following two commands, which adds the needful to your profile and current shell” or similar would be a better way to put it.

[aequitas]

"The terminal" can be really abstract or frightening (eg: you can remove all files without them going to the trash) to use even for programmers. I've had lots of colleagues that just copy-paste oneliners from a file without understanding what they do, to do their job and be fine with that.

> your profile and current shell

What is my profile in this case? What is the current shell? What even is a shell?

A better way would be to ask the user if they want this step to be done for them as part of the installation process. As first-time users will often have to install Brew just to get started on the learning curve of terminal usage.

[sundvor]

Or Win10 with WSL2, however I guess that can be covered as *nix .

I'll agree and further add that learning about the shell is essential knowledge building, just as touch typing is an essential skill to have, yet it's surprising how far one can get without.

Learned early on both of these will just make your life easier as a SWE.

[beermonster]

I know lots of software engineers that don’t even know what a shell is. Sadly.