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Comment by pkaodev | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm being naive, but it feels like if this is a problem for people they should be looking at how they write their code, not reaching for a library.

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This bug basically hits people who run long lived code sessions with large objects (i.e. data people).

I've hit it in both R and Python in interactive sessions. Otherwise it's generally a non issue.

I can definitely see this being helpful, particularly for the intended context. It would also be useful when you need to move notebook code to a different environment.

Completely. I interact with data people sometimes at work. There are bespoke one-of-a-kind venvs and giant notebooks everywhere. But that's okay. They don't have our job, it is not their job to build robust & properly deployed software. They know how to do their thing and we shouldn't lecture them on how to do it the "proper" way. Because I sure don't know how to do what they do - Pandas & matplotlib take me hours of googling to do anything.

I completely see the value in this tool for a particular style of programming.

I don't think the issue is telling someone how to do their jobs, but that when it comes to it, we are not properly communicating our stack preferences at all. Online we do, sure, but let's not shy away from having these discussions in the open. There is much to learn from each other's best and worst practices.

Software is complex and our memory is bottleneck to create software. We can only remember so many things therefore anything that we can make computer to "think" instead of us we have more memory to use for other work. In this case, instead of worrying if you are accessing some random global variable by accident is unnecessary cognitive work you. Why not just let computer do it while you think for actual things?

Congratulations, you just described the primary reasons for using languages like Rust - the polar opposite of Python & co.

There's been times when I've been dumped some script and told to get it in production. Yes it would've been better not to need this, but it's a handy first step.

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