I've been slowly developing the opinion that the emergence of Docker is in some ways a phenomenon of extreme JVM-envy. In between cracking jokes about "Write on

I've been slowly developing the opinion that the emergence of Docker is in some ways a phenomenon of extreme JVM-envy. In between cracking jokes about "Write once, test everywhere" in Java the critics decided "yes actually all our languages suck at cross platform by the way so we are going to hack together a giant kluge so that we can just keep coding however we like and carry on". So while Java had deprecated environment variables because "Hey, you know one day someone might make a system without environment variables" they were re-inventing the JVM as the Linux kernel so that `/dev/stdin` will always exist and they can stop worrying that another OS will ever exist. However I think this viewpoint misses some of the fundamental features of Docker that are nothing to do with platform independence and more about isolation, configuration management and orchestration. I would use docker and docker compose even if it could only run Java which is already cross platform. Because I love how it lets me map volumes, ports, orchestrate startup and shutdown with compose etc etc.