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Comment by inimino | Hacker News Reader

I was also baffled. However, if you follow the link to the "why we use docker" post you'll see the author is using a Mac and had difficulty before while following instructions written for Linux.

Data scientists using Macs for everything and sometimes needing to run Linux in a container to get work done is more common than you might think.

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    brew install coreutils

Lot less complexity than running things in docker.

Was just about to say. What text editing powerhouse from Linux (sed, awk, grep etc.) are not available on Mac? The answer is: none.

    "Able to install packages"

Hmmm no that don't look as good on my resume as "autodidact docker wizard"

There's something to be said for the cool-new-tech driven approach, when it comes to resume building.

There are some rather archaic behaviors of the versions of these tools that come by default on MasOSX.

For instance, on a mac the 'sed' command doesn't understand the difference between space and tab

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40311339/using-sed-on-ma...

Oh, very likely true. But nothing stands in your way to just replace them with the GNU versions. Still way easier than running a Docker container...

You do however now need to tell all the users of your tutorial to go and install brew, then install coreutils and then to replace every use of "sort" with "gsort", etc.

Running a docker container, regardless of what it does under the hood, is extremely easy on a mac. You install a program then do "docker run ...".

Some programs have different flags and behaviors between Mac OS and linux. This has bitten me quite a few times. Even on Linux there are often competing versions (BSD and GNU version might have different flags for example).

That won't replace the utils though, will it? You get ones with a g prefix as far as I remember.

Professional data scientists should probably do this stuff on company servers, not on their laptops.

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