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Comment by mherrmann | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has been coding for 20 years, "magic" is a negative adjective for me. I don't want magic code. I want code that is simple and works in obvious ways.

> You can even specify a version number

Sorry to be sarcastic here but wow, you mean I can even make sure that my code will not break at an arbitrary point in the future, when my dependency inevitably introduces a breaking change? Fantastic.

I understand that installing dependencies is a bit of a hassle. But really, once you have done it twice it takes seconds. And I would not want a mechanism that fetches dependencies as a side effect of my app running. I want to know what's going on when my app runs. The fewer moving parts, the better. Often, it's hard work to achieve this simplicity. But, at least in my experience, it pays off.

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This is a toy/neat experiment that someone made and they explicitly say you should not use it for production. This sort of criticism is inappropriate (or at best, poorly framed). This is Hacker News, and this is a Hack.

If I made a bot that drives cars around in GTA would you make a post ridiculing how dangerous my lane detection algorithm would be for a self-driving car in snow?

Furthermore, the point OP makes about L5 cars being presumably achievable while "L5 software" is not is a 100% valid point - why should we not aspire to that level of consistency and effectiveness in our systems? Maybe achieving this is actually possible and projects like this inspire the approaches that actually deliver those capabilities in a production-mature form.

You're basically saying that I am not allowed to give my opinion on this project, because it happens to be critical. I don't know how we can have interesting discussions in this forum if criticism is not allowed.

At the end of the day, I think you're saying it's a fun toy and I shouldn't worry, whereas my point was that I wouldn't even want to use it as a toy, and I am afraid it will lead especially less experienced programmers who do use it in production down a path that hurts them in the long run.

To comment further, I believe you take offense at the snarkiness of my original comment. That's fair. I think I could have phrased it in a more respectful way. I'm sorry.

Nope, your comment is poor because it’s off-topic, not critical. You saw the project and launched into a mild rant about “kids these days who use libraries for everything” when on-topic comments would be “I hope nobody actually uses this ;) Although in all seriousness based on my experience this kind of thinking is unironically already present in the software engineering community”. Your original comment fails to tie itself back to the project and it fails to demonstrate that you understood it was not meant for use in production. As such, it deserves as much disdain as a “Mozilla should fire its CEO” comment should get on a post about SpiderMonkey.

It's not at all self-evident that something like this is bad to inexperienced or naive developers, even if the readme has the obligatory "this is just for personal projects, don't use it in production" disclaimer. The comment is perfectly on-topic.

Honestly, even a “this a bad idea to use in production” would be an on-topic comment, and as I said the comment in and of itself is not poor it is just misplaced and such a lead could help it transition between the two topics. The primary issue is that the comment is not “don’t use this in production”, it’s just straight up “importing all the dependencies is what’s wrong in software today” which is no longer connected to the post.

You're allowed to comment.

People are allowed to point out when that comment is appropriate for a different context. They're allowed to do that with imperfect language too.

You're allowed to acknowledge you're wrong, and move on. You're also allowed to push back and explain why you think it's fine for this context.

The only person who has control over you is you. This is a web forum. A Random Stranger on the Internet calling a comment inappropriate shouldn't lead one to believe that "criticism is not allowed" in a particular forum.

And I think it's a nice toy. I haven't seen people break for using toys. I've mostly seen people break when they only do things one way, and habituate to believe other ways are wrong or bad. Toys are for playing, and great ways to discover which things work and which ones don't. Even IOCCC didn't result in broken programmers. Java sometimes did.

So I don't see either your comment or their response as ideal, but that's okay. I'd estimated 25% of my comments are poor, and you'd probably estimate me at 50% since I probably don't always realize my comments are poor. That's okay. Poor comments are parts of conversations. Pointing out they're poor is part of conversation too. Continuing to talk (and sometimes make poor comments) is too.

I'm with you 100% on this. Someone posted a project that is clearly a bad idea to actually use and your criticisms are perfectly justified and on-topic (not to mention correct).

I've also seen too many things of this nature in production to buy into the "it's just a toy, it's self-evidently not for real use" argument.

This is just a toy but might seem like a great idea for someone less experienced and could normalize bad practices.

Specifically stating to not use in production will not stop people from doing just that!

Requirement files aren't magic, neither are virtual envs. Every slightly professional IDE supports that. No need to create anti-patterns.

This. The Node.js community is a good example of where this has happened - lots of bad practices with fancy logos making it into the top 50 most depended upon packages (e.g. left-pad).

The top-level comment is just being critical. It's not inappropriate. People just don't like having their feelings hurt.

What's left pad's fancy logo? Also how is left pad a bad practice?

While I agree with this (in prod or development headed to prod), I'd love to be able to hand this to some of my colleagues who are either from Ruby or Lisp backgrounds or who do data science for use in Jupyter notebooks. Being able to just start Jupyter, start coding some small experiment and not worry about imports would be useful. Further, it would help my colleagues in data science who require a step by step walkthrough whenever we need to generate requirements.txt.

In my personal case, I have loads of dead code directories for various half-remembered Python ideas. It'd be convenient to have a lighter-weight "experiments" dir using something like this.

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