4 ms·

In general, don't tell people to "simply" or "just" use anything unless you're willing to provide the precise config that they need or otherwise hand-hold them

• livelielife 4y ago
  except that side of computing for which users are really "input" to be turned into "output" which is the industry for which users are really the product. user's data in, profits out.
• inconceivable 4y ago
  "trivial" also fits into this category. i've been keyboard jockeying for 20 years and every time i see that word i groan a little, because it's both a shitty flex and probably untrue.
  • tetha 4y ago
    My documentation skills have improved when I started to be critical about "obvious", or "trivial". And now I routinely end up writing "obviously", stop, and end up with 3 pages of clarification.
  • m463 4y ago
    Actually the best use of "trivial" is in the negative, like... "Wellllll, that's non-trivial."
• kjkjadksj 4y ago
  Check then for conda, which only asks you to copy and paste a shell command they provide for you and eventually say “yes.”
• mparnisari 4y ago
  THIIIIS i hate it when people say "oh just do this"!! "JUST" implies it will take me 3 seconds, where in 90% of the cases it takes me 3 hours!!
• nonbirithm 4y ago
  I agree with you, but the difference between being able to tell someone "if you need to install some dependencies in Rust, just use Cargo" and show them the documentation, and whatever the equivalent documentation is in Python are worlds apart. I think the author's argument would be weaker if he focused on a language other than Python that doesn't have a hellscape of a package ecosystem. And I remember custom build scripts with Cargo being a major pain at the time I used it, but the Cargo developers were able to sidestep major fundamental problems because they knew what didn't work with packaging in the decades before and managed to think about the design carefully enough from the start. Rust is different because the choice of package manager is "simply" Cargo, not necessarily that Cargo itself is trivial to use.
• theptip 4y ago
  I think this applies in some cases, but disagree here. “Just use poetry and pyenv” is my line, and I stand by it because these tools are well documented, and work well for most use-cases. It’s contrasted with a bunch of other more complex options, in tedious yak shave conversations. Often in threads where many people are complaining about how confusing the multitude of options are. It’s not confusing if you short-circuit the conversation; if you need advice, don’t go down the rabbit hole, just use poetry and pyenv on MacOS, you will make your life easier than the alternatives. There are plenty of docs that will give the hand-holding that you are looking for, so nice you have made the decision. If you know what you are doing there are arguments for other options, and data scientists have different tool chains. But I think we make it harder for new engineers by having five different ways of doing it, each with people arguing that actually their way is better.