why is it not possible to install a solidity compiler in the geth console?

Question

I've been trying every which way to install Solidity in my geth console- why? -because the outdated tutorials recommend to do that- and as a programmer you need to have the disposition of not accepting "no" for an answer from a stupid computer- need to just keep hacking away at it until you can get the damn thing to do what you want- or you'll go nowhere- so- speaking of going nowhere- back to the point of this question...

I've decided- after consulting multiple pages across the web and this website that I should just find a different way to compile my smart contracts- probably using this remix thing

so before I concede defeat to this task- I want to know- what are the relative merits of compiling smart contracts within the geth console? Why was it put in there in the first place? Why was it removed?

Answer 1

The reasoning behind the change is here: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/209

This has caused some controversy here: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/issues/3793

To be honest I think this is more of a "documentation" issue than a "tech" issue. The docs should be updated to reflect how the tech works, rather than having the tech held back by what (old) docs say.

It's not that big of a deal to install truffle separately or solc separately and do your compilations outside of geth. See How to compile Solidity contracts with Geth v1.6? for more details.