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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

Ok cool but all this is just complaining that your build system isn't hermetic and that's someone else's fault? Like, what? You want to "not care about any of this" but then get annoyed when that bites you in the ass?

Avoid writing huge, long rambling comments and try to simplify your arguments to less than 100 words. You may find the fault, and the fix, becomes obvious.

Start with trying to refute "The python2 executable still functions correctly as does all other code you have that relies on python2" without referencing anything specific to your build practices.

> This is also hilarious since you had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find the only instances of "non backwards compatible" features in JS/HTML, an environment notorious for backwards compatibility. Also, `alert` may still stay in.

Those where the first that came to mind. There are many others, and many more if you widen it to server-side JS.

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> Avoid writing huge, long rambling comments and try to simplify your arguments to less than 100 words. You may find the fault, and the fix, becomes obvious.

If you don't want to read the comment, then also don't bother responding. The comment is long because I am explaining a death by a thousand paper cuts situation. Don't worry, Python isn't going to die just because I don't like it. You don't have to defend Python even if you don't feel like reading my comment. You can also just ignore it or come back to it when you have time to engage with it thoughtfully, instead of just asserting you are correct and having your only argument be that I can't fit my argument to the arbitrary word length you've come up with.

> Those where the first that came to mind. There are many others, and many more if you widen it to server-side JS.

You should stick to talking about Python. This is just not the case and not the culture of browser JS. It's honestly fairly disrespectful of the monumental work browser engineers have done to make that a reality. If you want to switch your argument to server-side JS (where blink and alert don't exist and you are thus leaving it completely as an exercise to the reader to come up with the similar situation), fine, but node 0.10 runs exactly the same today as it did 10 years ago. Again, the bar I am setting is low: have the unchanged thing still gettable and still runnable. I get it. When you work in a certain environment, you imagine all the problems it has must be common and all the benefits are unique. But that isn't the case with this particular problem.

It’s possible to explain a death by 1000 cuts situation in less than ~630 words. Despite that in the now nearly 1,000 words you’ve written in this sub thread alone you haven’t really asserted anything concrete.

Start with trying to refute "The python2 executable still functions correctly as does all other code you have that relies on python2" without referencing anything specific to your build practices.

Sure, can't get python2 in Alpine 3.17. Few enough words for you?

Yep! That’s perfect, thank you. If that’s your condensed point I’ll repeat my first comment: you’re looking for other people (alpine) to maintain python 2 for you forever.

Presumably you’re too “not caring about any of this” to just pin your image to “alpine:3.15” and have it just work exactly as before? And presumably you’re too not bothered with any of this to understand that you had to do this because you didn’t pin the image to begin with, so your builds are not reproducible?

And this is anyone else’s problem why?

You are certainly making progress on the argument you believe you are having.

My point has always been simple: Python causes more pain than other languages when you're not directly using it. I can get node 0.10 on alpine 3.17 just fine. This demonstrates that your comparisons to server JS are completely wrong. But I know, you're going to tell me this is my problem and I expect the world to do work for me or something. Nope. As I've repeatedly stated, I've taken the time to get it to work already. I know you want to believe I'm here waiting for you to fix it, but I'm not. All I've said is: "Huh, I don't have this problem with anything else. I'll keep that in mind before I decide to use stuff from this ecosystem in the future".

You can’t get node 0.10 on alpine Linux 3.17 from the official main repository. That 18.x/19.x. So you’re using a community one. And so, you could use a community python2 APK/install process. Except that doesn’t exist. Because nobody wants it. And you’re unwilling to make it yourself, thus you’re complaining that nobody else is maintaining this port for you.

The argument I’m making is none of your issues stem from Python specifically. As others have said, you are conflating your own confusion and unwillingness to understand with systemic toolchain issues that do exist. Except, you are not being bitten by those - you’re still at the “shoot myself in the foot and blame the gun” stage.

> You can’t get node 0.10 on alpine Linux 3.17 from the official main repository. That 18.x/19.x. So you’re using a community one. And so, you could use a community python2 APK/install process. Except that doesn’t exist.

What a slight of hand to say "You can get it the same way you can with node, except for you can't". You should go into politics. Anyways, you asked me for a simple example, I gave it, and now you want to say what I want doesn't count because "no one wants it". Just choose a different challenge next time.

> thus you’re complaining that nobody else is maintaining this port for you.

I'm just pointing out a discrepancy with other environments. One you initially denied existed, and once I trivially pointed out did exist, you switched to attacking the complaint itself. Look, if I'm looking at two toasters and one has less features, sure, you can bark at me and tell me to make my own toaster if I want that so bad. OK, sure. Or I'll just get the one that has the features I want. You are still allowed to believe that those features are useless, but you can't deny they exist. It is OK for you to disagree with the properties I value in an ecosystem, you don't have to resort to telling me I don't know what I'm doing just because I value a different set of properties in the ecosystem.

You’re looking at two identical toasters from two different manufacturers.

Someone has glued on a big red alarm clock onto the side of one of the toasters.

Your conclusion after seeing this is to write to the manufacturer of the toaster without the alarm clock glued onto it and complain that it’s lacking a big red alarm clock and say they suck because they are not copying the amazing alarm clock features that the other manufacturer has.

Ok.

This is a fiction in your head. I’m not writing any manufacturer. I’m casually commenting on a forum that I’m pretty sure is not Python’s official complaint box. This is as ridiculous as yelling at someone at the bar who says “yeah, I don’t like to use Python that much”. The entire “thrust” of my “threat” to Python is that I’ll try to avoid it in the future. You’re blowing this way out of proportion. If I reacted this way whenever someone said something bad about JavaScript or Objective-C (which I promise you get way more “drive by” complaints), I don’t know what’d I do!

Replace “write to the manufacturer” with “leave a review on Amazon”. The point doesn’t change.

Nobody is threatened by anything, and my point has nothing to do with Python.

If someone posts a comment saying “curl sucks! Every time I run it it just prints ‘command not found’” I’d of course try to tell them that’s not a fault with curl.

If they replied with “yes it is because I can’t figure out how to install it from this 3rd party site” then the discussion may become protected.

But ok, maybe we will agree to disagree.

No, you’d refuse to read the curl complaint because it’s too long, and instead arbitrarily decide that the entire discussion should hinge on issuing a challenge for them to find you one place where curl doesn’t work. And then when he does, you’d say “So what! No one wants curl there anyways!”

Afterwards you’d get involved in a long weird analogy discussion about two people arguing about git. But that fault would be shared by both of them.

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