Hacker News Reader

Comment by scottrogowski | Hacker News Reader

Author here. My goal with that one-liner was to convey immediately what it is - an embedded database that implements the PyMongo/MongoDB API.

Is it semantically perfect? Probably not. Will Mongita be useful to Python developers who are accustomed to saving their data in idiosyncratic JSON files because they don't want the overhead of a MongoDB server? Maybe! I hope so.

View on HN

Thanks for sharing your project. It’s probably not a good comparison. SQLite is in such high esteem and such a well developed high quality mature product. So the comparison is sort of inviting criticism that gets in the way of people appreciating what is good about your project.

This is good and helpful feedback. Thank you. I'm humbled by how well this has done so far but definitely feeling the criticism. A title like, "Mongita is embedded MongoDB for Python", while being a statement without ambiguity, doesn't immediately convey the vision for why this might be useful to people. SQLite by contrast is a nice rhetorical anchor that people understand. I'll have to think through whether there is a better way to convey it that fits that goal.

Right, a little controversy never hurts to attract attention. You will have to balance between the positive attention through comparison to an known good vs. potentially unmet expectations that known good brings.

If your goal is to reach pythonistas with this, then suffering the “this isn’t really like SQLite” critique will be worth it. On the contrary, if the vision is really to be like SQLite, i.e. broadly portable to many languages and platforms and very robust high quality code then the disappointment in its current implementation may outweigh the near term attention.

In either case this is probably a good measure of demand for such a thing.

I am astonished that this is this is the sentiment. I've always of SQLite as a small, self-contained implementation of a SQL DB server. And so the comparison makes perfect sense to me.

It’s not even remotely self contained though, so how is the comparison relevant?

Looked self-contained to me.

It literally runs on an interpreter; that’s the opposite of self contained.

To me it was a good analogy. But I think the key for me thinking it's reasonable is that I go into Show HN posts with milder expectations than other submissions.

I would never pick MongoDB over a traditional relational database, so I can't judge this well, but I can still see how people would find it useful. Nice work!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com