Show HN: We're creating the “State Tool” and want your feedback

activestate.com

9 points·naatan··3 comments

Hi HN, I'm the tech-lead for the State Tool, here to hopefully get some useful feedback!

Our aim with the State Tool is to provide a tool that solves common dev tasks in a universal way. Think of how we tend to abuse the Makefile to just contain some aliases, or how we might use Gulp when using JavaScript and setupfiles when using Python. There is a large amount of tool abuse and inconsistency that makes jumping between projects hard and onboarding new people to a project harder. The State Tool aims to be the one stop shop to address these issues.

Currently we're still in beta. This mainly means features are still in flux and the general user experience is still forming. What we really need is feedback from developers on what they like, dislike and would like to see from the tool.

Happy to answer any questions you might have.

I couldn't readily tell how much value this is for non-Python users coming from a name I strongly associate with Python.

Right now we only support Python and Perl, so if you don't wish to use those languages for writing common dev tasks scripts I agree there isn't much value here -- yet.

The language portion of this is powered by the ActiveState Platform which is quickly ramping up. We're working hard on adding support for other open source languages so the relevancy for users of those languages will come into play soon.

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