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Comment by crabbone | Hacker News Reader

* Fast -- in what way? How can you even measure the speed of an environment?..

* Declarative -- as a developer, I don't care... Why is this important? Also, declarative means there's a bunch of imperative code hiding behind it. It just makes it harder to debug when things break.

* Composable -- in over 25 years of being a developer not even once did I want my dev. environment to compose with another...

And the article opens up with:

> Simple JSON-like language

Why on earth?.. And things down the road that announce "features" like "run processes"... Is this some kind of April 1st joke that is meant to be funny because its two weeks too late?

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> Fast -- in what way? How can you even measure the speed of an environment?..

How fast it installs, how fast it's ready when needed. This can be relevant depending on how you use them. For example, if I let every script run in a separate environment, it would matter if it's ready in 10 seconds or 10 milliseconds.

> Declarative -- as a developer, I don't care... Why is this important? Also, declarative means there's a bunch of imperative code hiding behind it. It just makes it harder to debug when things break.

As a developer, I do care how much work something will offload on me. And declarative is more about the state of the world, than the execution of a process. If there is a trustable system which can manage that world for me, then I will have less work, and fewer problems.

I'm sorry that you've been a dev for 25 years and you've never worked anywhere where microservices and distributed systems are the norm, being able to modularly combine and recombine systems can be invaluable for rapid development and testing.

Reply with some real explanation instead of snark.

You really set up your development environment using microservices? How is this subject relevant to development environment setup?

If you are interested in my job history: it includes two of the top-ten largest US s/w companies. My area of expertise is storage (more in the direction of SDS as this was a fashion when I got into this field) and more recently HPC. I'm less familiar with the aspects of modern programming s.a. making Web sites for example, and somehow, I have a feeling that programmers who make Web sites really like talking about microservices. So, maybe this will explain my lack of understanding of how you set up your development environment using microservies.

> You really set up your development environment using microservices? How is this subject relevant to development environment setup?

If you are working on something that involves microservices then you might have several different projects with different development environment needs, all checked out locally. It doesn't mean you're "setting up your development environment" using microservices, it just means that's literally what you're developing.

I think, you are talking about what I'd call the "testing environment". For me, development environment is made of the editor, tools that work on my source code s.a. compilers, linters, maybe language server etc. and things that help me with administrative tasks related to programming (eg. bug tracker, version control, communication channels).

In my practice, it's very uncommon to be able to run even a small portion of the project I'm working on on my personal computer. There's usually no way for me to even attempt to set up anything resembling the system I'm building on my computer. Which is unfortunate, and I'd love to be able to, but it's just physically impossible.

I don't know how typical my case is. I'd assume that programmers working on desktop applications or phone / Web stuff are more likely to be able to fit their entire product or at least a significant portion of it on their own computer. In which case they could think about their testing environment as being part of their development environment. Still, I'd not call it that... I mean, conceptually, it's for testing, so it's a testing environment. You don't need it to do development, it's just coincidental that you have both in close proximity.

Are you saying you never run the code you work on at all? You can't e.g. step through it in a debugger? For testing even the simplest thing you have to submit your code to some external system? If that's what you mean then indeed I think it's pretty unusual.

I've worked on stuff that's not at all web or desktop related (e.g. Materialize, hosted cloud data warehouse software) and still, we had ways of running it locally; otherwise most people would have found it impossible to develop.

It sounds like this isn’t something you need or want. So why shit on it?

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