5 ms·

"too lazy" seems like an unfair characterization. If a service lets you do what you want faster, why not use it? I'm not familiar with Kimono, but if you can ju

"too lazy" seems like an unfair characterization. If a service lets you do what you want faster, why not use it? I'm not familiar with Kimono, but if you can just rip it out and replace it with your own code later, why not?

minimaxir 11y ago
Laziness is a secret form of technical debt. For example, I hit an issue when using Kimono where it refused to accept a given regular expression as valid, even after trying testing many variations which passed a regex checker. If I had just started with Python/BeautifulSoup, I could have completed the entire scraper in that time.
- michaelmior 11y ago
  While as I said, I don't know anything about Kimono, I think that statement requires qualification. If the "lazy" solution allows me to iterate faster on solving the problem, then even if I need to replace it later when my requirements are more complex but better defined, it's potentially a net win (even if you have to reimplement some of the same pieces yourself later).
  - minimaxir 11y ago
    See x1024's comment above. (best case scenario is that it's not significantly faster)
x1024 11y ago
It wasn't really faster. The OP actually touched on that point, but let me repeat it without ambiguity: An actual parser for the complex use-cases requires some custom code and isn't covered by what Kimono does. What Kimono does can trivially be achieved by writing 15 lines of python (after importing httplib2 + BeautifulSoup). Which is even reusable. The only real use-case they had was the visual interface, so that "non-programmers can do it. No code required, etc. etc." Heh. As if that ever did, or ever could work.
- trhway 11y ago
  > "non-programmers can do it. No code required, etc. etc." translating for the Palantir's business - "a DHS/FBI/CIA analyst can dot it. No code required" Easy scraping websites for terms like "subversion", "Arab", "airplane" (cue starting scenes from Harold & Kumar 2) ...
- derefr 11y ago
  We, as programmers, are called in to solve the "complex use-cases." So we tend to divide the world into "things that need a novel program written for them" and "trivial problems." You know what else has a visual interface? Excel. It works great! For "trivial problems." It gets stretched all the time into places where programming would have been faster, but for the "trivial problems", just being able to have a domain-expert non-programmer use Excel to implement the solution directly, is a lot faster and simpler than calling in a programmer and attempting to fully specify the problem to them.
  - x1024 11y ago
    I'll be the first to agree that Excel "actually works" and "solves a real problem". But if you had actually used Kimono, you'd know that it was one of those tools that was just finicky enough to be unusable by "regular people". And just weak enough to not be productive for programmers.

minimaxir 11y ago

Laziness is a secret form of technical debt. For example, I hit an issue when using Kimono where it refused to accept a given regular expression as valid, even after trying testing many variations which passed a regex checker. If I had just started with Python/BeautifulSoup, I could have completed the entire scraper in that time.

michaelmior 11y ago
While as I said, I don't know anything about Kimono, I think that statement requires qualification. If the "lazy" solution allows me to iterate faster on solving the problem, then even if I need to replace it later when my requirements are more complex but better defined, it's potentially a net win (even if you have to reimplement some of the same pieces yourself later).
- minimaxir 11y ago
  See x1024's comment above. (best case scenario is that it's not significantly faster)

x1024 11y ago

It wasn't really faster. The OP actually touched on that point, but let me repeat it without ambiguity: An actual parser for the complex use-cases requires some custom code and isn't covered by what Kimono does. What Kimono does can trivially be achieved by writing 15 lines of python (after importing httplib2 + BeautifulSoup). Which is even reusable. The only real use-case they had was the visual interface, so that "non-programmers can do it. No code required, etc. etc." Heh. As if that ever did, or ever could work.

trhway 11y ago
> "non-programmers can do it. No code required, etc. etc." translating for the Palantir's business - "a DHS/FBI/CIA analyst can dot it. No code required" Easy scraping websites for terms like "subversion", "Arab", "airplane" (cue starting scenes from Harold & Kumar 2) ...
derefr 11y ago
We, as programmers, are called in to solve the "complex use-cases." So we tend to divide the world into "things that need a novel program written for them" and "trivial problems." You know what else has a visual interface? Excel. It works great! For "trivial problems." It gets stretched all the time into places where programming would have been faster, but for the "trivial problems", just being able to have a domain-expert non-programmer use Excel to implement the solution directly, is a lot faster and simpler than calling in a programmer and attempting to fully specify the problem to them.
- x1024 11y ago
  I'll be the first to agree that Excel "actually works" and "solves a real problem". But if you had actually used Kimono, you'd know that it was one of those tools that was just finicky enough to be unusable by "regular people". And just weak enough to not be productive for programmers.