Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS • Hacker News Board

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#281

Post by BlueTemplar » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 11:10 PM UTC

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #103

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I teach using python. You should try explaining virtual environments to students, most of them with no programming experience, or any real notion of the state of a computer system. I do, because we recommend students use them. Every class consists of endless debugging of student systems. After that you might understand the OP's viewpoint.

I think docker would be a much better alternative. You can just hand students a pre-built docker with everything installed and they are free to mess up the system without any consequences.

Might as well use Guix at that point, since that kind of OS-based dependency management seems to be the future.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#282

Post by BlueTemplar » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 11:28 PM UTC

promer wrote: post #264

fergie wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with Software Carpentry? If so, what do you think about it? -> https://www.ub.uio.no/english/libraries/dsc/carpentry-uio/

If you visit the link https://swcarpentry.github.io/python-novice-inflammation/ which offers the introduction to Python, you'll find this strange statement. > Although one can install a plain-vanilla Python and all required libraries by hand, we recommend installing Anaconda ... In a novice course, if the official version of Python and its tools all work, why is this organization recommending a product from a for-pro…

As much as I would rather not associate with these people (to stay polite), especially in an educational context, note that you do see people recommending the use of VSCode / Github / Windows / MacOS here all the time, all of which are orders of magnitude worse than Anaconda.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#283

Post by BlueTemplar » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 11:48 PM UTC

defrost wrote: post #256

mistrial9 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this has nothing to do with LLMs at all.. you are uninformed about the old feud between mathematics and statistics so you claim this is not true. anyway, on reflection, the word "is" does not fit here.. statistics and mathematics are not disjoint, but no, statistics is not a field of mathematics.. ask around among people with serious graduate studies in mathematics and they will fill you in.. Maybe it overlaps into t…

> this has nothing to do with LLMs at all They are plugged into the backend of many search engines these days and they excel at picking out the nature of the pattern | result that a questioner wants and feeding back what they want to hear. > ask around among people with serious graduate studies in mathematics and they will fill you in I checked in with Terence Tao who I first met at an Australian math club get togeth…

Historically, it took some time for statistics to become mathemathised - they started out as letters to the higher state bureaucracy level with the modern era equivalent of bullet points, then some tables with still mostly words in them, IIRC mathematisation mostly started in the mid-19th century, and maybe only grew much heavier once physicists started to adopted some of these techniques ?

But I feel all this discussion has gone off topic that was the teaching of statistics in our post- (post-?) modern era.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#284

Post by BlueTemplar » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 12:00 AM UTC

openrisk wrote: post #195

Alas, the audience targeted by the post would most likely have preferred a video of the instructions rather than text. For tasks related to configuring a visual computing environment (such as the desktop), this would also make some sense. Might be a lost cause in the tiktok era, but the text / command line / unix pipes paradigm of computing is extremely powerful and it would be a blessing if educators would find way…

That website has both.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#285

Post by BlueTemplar » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 12:05 AM UTC

bitfilped wrote: post #255

Why not teach students how to work with their .zshrc file and become better computer users? I've never understood the aversion in academia to teaching people how computers work. This could be "fixed" with a simple sed line or `vim/emacs/nano ~.zshrc` rather than a multi step process of dragging files around and futzing around in the UI. I see this all the time in higher ed, so much wasted time and effort coming up wi…

What aversion ? Generalist basic computer usage courses are mandatory in undergrad, and this includes basic Linux command line usage and shell scripting.

But those might be too late if the students run into these issues during their very first weeks. And Python is pretty decent for Hello World kinds of programming-adjacent courses.

Re: Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

#286

Post by mplanchard » Sun, Sep 08, 2024, 3:38 PM UTC

okanat wrote: post #71

mplanchard wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is quite complicated to understand or to set up, yes, but I agree that it is easy to use. We use it at work for our dev environments. Like two or three of us are able to actually add packages, adjust nix configs, etc. Everyone else just runs `direnv allow` and automatically gets everything they need to build and run out software.

If you don't have enough manpower who can control and collaborate on the development of the environment, the project will not succeed to be adopted. Programming language-specific dependency tools succeeded due to their user friendliness, however abysmal they are in multi-language / OS dependent environments (and I despise them for that reason). Cargo.toml, go.mod, conan.txt, Dockerfile etc. all are can be understood…

Our direct experience counteracts this point. We have docs on how to add nix dependencies, and a file where they’re defined. For anything already packaged in nix, everyone can figure out how to add a line in that file to add something to everyone’s dev environment. We have over 3 years only wound up having to write our own derivations for two or three things.

We still use language-specific tools for those dependencies, though, since that is what people are familiar with. I think this strikes a fine balance: nix describes the “operating system” that we all work in, and then Cargo, npm, etc lockfiles describe each language’s dependencies.