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by rglullis
816 days ago
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> "populate me this sample data so I can experiment with the app" Which is well within the role of the developer. "Deploy to Hetzner" is not. > I was under the impression that the person in question was wearing several role hats at the time. Sure, I also have to do everything on my own in my own projects. But again, the function determines the tool, not the person performing the job. When I'm wearing my application developer hat, you'll see try to do as much as possible with Python, but that doesn't mean that I will try to turn every problem into a python script. |
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Well, OK, I can't argue with that as much. Maybe the guy truly found it easier to do so? No clue. I know I'd definitely try with a shell script, then with the project's language, and only then with a dedicated tool. As much as I try to be a good senior backend dev -- and I know a lot of stuff and tooling that are not at all mandatory for my role -- I still can't find the time and energy to become a properly good DevOps; too much investment, and for specific cloud platforms. To this day I can't justify it and can't make myself "git gud" with AWS.
> When I'm wearing my application developer hat, you'll see try to do as much as possible with Python, but that doesn't mean that I will try to turn every problem into a python script.
No you really should not, Python is a nightmare in portability. I can trivially use venv-s and other tooling to make sure stuff is isolated and works fine but the whole house of cards is still always just one `brew upgrade` command away from falling apart. Eventually I've given up. If Python can't be trivially made portable then it's a bad tool for scripting, no matter what many people think and say (in fact, a lot of people using a tool often times speaks badly for its quality; to me "Python is good" is a mass delusion but that's a huge topic in itself that I won't tackle here). The fact that many people don't know anything else but Python is not an excuse.
Golang is a much better choice for quick scripting and that's a demonstrable fact. You can parse CLI flags and use their values and even throw some validation is some 10-15 coding lines and from then on you can use various super-useful libraries; there even exist a few that emulate a number of UNIX tools so you can still have a single binary that can do a lot without depending on anything except a kernel being present in the system (which also makes the resulting binary very convenient in constrained / container environments).
You might think I am getting hung up on details but I felt that I have to debunk the idea that Python is a good scripting tool. No it really isn't, and most Python devs never test on a random Mac or Linux machine where the dev is NOT using Python as a primary language. It's a fragile mess.
But now we're arguing in circles about familiarity. :) I recognize the irony. But for what it's worth, I didn't know Golang and made it a goal to learn it long time ago because I liked its distribution story and (mostly) ease of use (with a bunch of caveats nowadays, sadly).