| Philip Guo wrote a great post several years ago under the title "Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery"[1] that seemed to get somewhat mixed but mostly positive reception. Much of the negative reception seemed to be chained to sophomoric arguments originating from folks stuck in the second panel of the glowing brain meme who wrongly thought of Guo being stuck in the first. The real truth behind the mess we're in[2] is that there is a ubiquitous, universal runtime that almost every computer comes equipped with, and the problem lies with the folks responsible for those ecosystems who either don't see these things as problems, or somehow believe that what the future somehow holds is native support for R/Python/what-have-you in the browser. Tooling is a massive problem, though, and one that the browser vendors themselves don't seem to care to get right. (Although there is the Iodide project, in part supported by Mozilla.) And it really doesn't help that the browser realm has come to be conflated with the NodeJS community because they share a common language. I've written a fairly thoughtful post[3] before, tying these two topics together: > After finding out where to download the SDK and then doing exactly that, you might then spend anywhere from a few seconds or minutes to what might turn out to be a few days wrestling with it before it's set up for your use. [...] > the question is whether it's possible to contrive a system (a term I'll use to loosely refer to something involving a language, an environment, and a set of practices) built around the core value that zero-cost setup is important 1. http://pgbovine.net/command-line-bullshittery.htm 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4 3. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/03/06/how-to-displace-java... |