I don't care about the internals. I care about "just" being able to run it.
I find that most JS projects work fairly well: "npm install" maybe followed by "npm run build" or the like. This isn't enforced by npm and I don't think npm is perfect here, but practical speaking as a non-JS dev just wanting to run some JS projects: it works fairly well for almost all JS projects I've wanted to run in the last five years or so.
A "run_me.py" that would *Just Work™" is fine. I don't overly care what it does internally as long as it's not hugely slow or depends on anything other than "python". Ideally this should be consistent throughout the ecosystem.
To be honest I can't imagine shipping any project intended to be run by users and not have a simple, fool-proof, and low-effort way of running it by anyone of any skill level, which doesn't depend on any real knowledge of the language.
> To be honest I can't imagine shipping any project intended to be run by users and not have a simple, fool-proof, and low-effort way of running it by anyone of any skill level, which doesn't depend on any real knowledge of the language.
This is how we got GH Issues full of inane comments, and blogs from mediocre devs recommending things they know nothing about.
I see nothing wrong with not catering to the lowest common denominator.
I didn’t say that everyone is an idiot. I implied that gate keeping is useful as a first pass against people who are unlikely to have the drive to keep going when they experience difficulty.
When I was a kid, docs were literally a book. If you asked for help and didn’t cite what you had already tried / read, you’d be told to RTFM.
Python has several problems. Its relative import system is deranged, packaging is a mess, and yes, on its face needing to run a parallel copy of the interpreter to pip install something is absurd. I still love it. It’s baked into every *nix distro, a REPL is a command away, and its syntax is intuitive.
I maintain that the relative ease of JS – and more powerfully, Node – has created a monstrous ecosystem of poorly written software, with its adherents jumping to the latest shiny every few months because this time, it’s different. And I _like_ JS (as a frontend language).
