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by IceDane 841 days ago
Oh No. Is it that time again? Someone who isn't really a front-end developer reinventing front-end development.

I can't wait to be handed an application by my data scientists that uses this and is a complete trash fire that I need to rebuild from scratch... Again. I guess streamlit has competition.
2 comments
screye 841 days ago
It comes from a place of necessity, not want. In many product engineering teams, a solution doesn't exist until there is a UI experience to interact with it.

It allows data scientists to showcase the benefit of their model as a full experience.

I wouldn't use it for a large scale app. But tools like these are excellent for quickly mocking up a sample UI to sell an idea to your leadership. Too often leadership does not get the benefits of a ML/AI/DataScience driven feature if they can't see it inside something that resembles a UX.

Front end people don't get this pain, because their work has immediate visible impact. Backend work doesn't need to be sold because it naturally emerges out of the needs of supporting a certain number of users. ML work, lacks visibility just like backend but isn't as self evident as backend work.

Tools like streamlit fill that gap.

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bormaj 841 days ago
This is probably the best summarization I've seen that describes this space. Even outside of ML, there's a real use case for building small, contained UIs for non-technical people to use in place of CLI tools.

The focus of these products should be 0 to 1 rather than 1 to Inf.

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wruza 841 days ago
While the sentiment is relatable, I think it’s too harsh. Frontend devs would better thought why people ignore their mainstream and use simpler tools instead. For what’s worth, the scenario you described assumes they did something useful behind that trash fire and for some reason avoided dealing with a frontend team/guy. Explanation through pure incompetence fails to see and meet their needs.
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wiseowise 841 days ago
I’m not a frontend dev and even I don’t understand why would you use this over vanilla html + css + JS. You don’t need to be a front end dev to do a basic UI like this.
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