XKCD on Docker | Hacker News Reader

XKCD on Docker

xkcd.com

118 pointsboffinism17 comments

Ouch. The punchline is funny because in many cases it's painfully true... especially in "enterprise" land.

Don't forget to hover over the comic.

On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, I think it's making the point that this isn't necessarily a bad thing, however aesthetically offensive it is.

"Enlightenment" indeed.

Exactly, I think the enlightenment in this case is being at peace with the idea that one cannot understand or fully manage everything in a technology stack.

Success does not come from achieving total understanding, but from being able to cleverly pick and choose what to manage and what to leave as a black box based on the problem before you.

Because I can install nextcloud in a single cli line. With out it I need about 9 scripts worth of stuff (example of what I wrote to do it) https://github.com/OhioVR/nextcloud_debian_install_scripts/t...

If you want to learn a whole software stack, building and administration to just TRY a program ONCE I won't stop you. But there are better ways like using docker.

I use docker for my build system for this very reason, as my chain depends on a difficult to install Autodesk SDK, which requires a very specific version of Python. I don't expect it to work properly on most modern Linux distributions without virtualenv and other advanced trickery, and there's not even a chance on Windows. With Docker though, once I had the environment set up, unfamiliar newcomers on the three major platforms can then compile and run the project with minimal fuss.

(Of course, in the future I'll be working to remove that odd dependency entirely, but for now, this works.)

It helps that in my particular case, the build _target_ is an embedded platform, so I don't need to worry about native details in the final executable; hiding the environmental details in the container doesn't matter all that much.

Me too - though for me the installation tools are fairly standard (SBT + npm), it's still like 10-ish steps. Docker's basically a vehicle for safely running apt-get in a script on all my developers' machines.

I'd personally just prepare a small VirtualBox image with everything required to build the code, and release that instead.

A mod may want to update the URL from the homepage to a permalink[0]. The next comic update will ruin this post.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1988/

Done. Thanks!

Someone needs to talk to Randall Munroe (author of xkcd) and update the explanation for this. [1] I’m not sure if the comic is taking a dig at those who use Docker or at Docker itself or both (in every case, putting together things they don’t understand well but claiming to have accomplished “enlightenment”).

[1]: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1988

My take is that it's not even really Docker-specific, but Docker users are a convenient example. There are plenty of programmers (Docker-using and otherwise) who just copy-paste code and glue together frameworks without really understanding what they're doing.

CS is a magic blackbox and/or a magic cooking book for a lot of people in the industry.

My take is that most people don't know what the hell they're doing most of the time. We're all trying to figure it out. When I was 20 I was copy-pasting the hell out of Rails examples. By being curious and actively incorporating ideas I've come across I've begun (15 years later) to have opinions on things in software development. Am I ever going to be a kernel contributor, or figure out implement compiler optimizations? Unlikely. But I love my job and the people around me support my continued education (in docker and everything else). That's all you can ask for.

I love xkcd, but you have to take it with a grain of salt. This comic was written by the same person who wrote this one: https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

Well the Title is "Containers". Punchline is about writing software or glue together things you dont understand.

The mention of that hyped and also hilariously buggy product seems relevant. See https://thehftguy.com/2016/11/01/docker-in-production-an-his... for a few years old example of this "gluing together things without understanding"

I remember when xkcd used to be funny.

Don't just leave us hanging! What's the last funny xkcd comic?

well good, your short term memory is in tact.

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