i don't know about "useless". scientific computing, for instance -- you may have a weird set of dependencies for some code that you want to deploy a copy of on

i don't know about "useless". scientific computing, for instance -- you may have a weird set of dependencies for some code that you want to deploy a copy of on 200 slightly heterogeneous nodes, once, and hopefully never again; but, it's vitally important that people in the future have the possibility of replicating your computation. containers are the perfect solution for this. in fact, in my experience they essentially do fix a broken culture around reproducibility of computational experiments.