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I stand on the shoulders of giants - all the kind folks who freely contributed to the Python package system. I can now spend time solving actual problems rathe

I stand on the shoulders of giants - all the kind folks who freely contributed to the Python package system. I can now spend time solving actual problems rather than reinventing the wheel.

zer00eyz 2y ago
You (and i) are more of a raccoon picking though a dumpster looking for working scraps of code that you can glue together. Let's be candid, we all have package management Stockholm syndrome to some degree... the reality is that our laziness keeps us going back for more. The performance gain comes at the cost of not knowing how some large percentage of your stack works or if it is going to be the next XZ. Im not going to stop using packages, because that would suck, but I'm not so rosy eyed about them any longer. There are lots of problems in ecosystems and we're bad about addressing them.
- williamcotton 2y ago
  There is no such thing as a free lunch!
- enceladus06 2y ago
  Lots of different ecosystems. Mamba + docker are great though. Pip is ok. Apt works, but we were using the same thing in 2006. If these different bits didn't exist, and have ChatGPT telling me that they exist then most work wouldn't get done...so there's that.
- tibbydudeza 2y ago
  Agree - nodejs npm system - some of the code - eish. I love the racoon analogy :). Pandas for me a was game changer and a new career path.
- int_19h 2y ago
  Vernor Vinge very accurately predicted how programming will develop 25 years ago. "Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines — flying machines, the peasants said — from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said — was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex — and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely… the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0 - second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge. “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham. “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation. “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what — even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.” Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy ...”"

I stand on the shoulders of giants - all the kind folks who freely contributed to the Python package system. I can now spend time solving actual problems rather than reinventing the wheel.

zer00eyz 2y ago

You (and i) are more of a raccoon picking though a dumpster looking for working scraps of code that you can glue together. Let's be candid, we all have package management Stockholm syndrome to some degree... the reality is that our laziness keeps us going back for more. The performance gain comes at the cost of not knowing how some large percentage of your stack works or if it is going to be the next XZ. Im not going to stop using packages, because that would suck, but I'm not so rosy eyed about them any longer. There are lots of problems in ecosystems and we're bad about addressing them.

williamcotton 2y ago
There is no such thing as a free lunch!
enceladus06 2y ago
Lots of different ecosystems. Mamba + docker are great though. Pip is ok. Apt works, but we were using the same thing in 2006. If these different bits didn't exist, and have ChatGPT telling me that they exist then most work wouldn't get done...so there's that.
tibbydudeza 2y ago
Agree - nodejs npm system - some of the code - eish. I love the racoon analogy :). Pandas for me a was game changer and a new career path.
int_19h 2y ago
Vernor Vinge very accurately predicted how programming will develop 25 years ago. "Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines — flying machines, the peasants said — from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said — was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex — and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely… the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0 - second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge. “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham. “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation. “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what — even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.” Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy ...”"