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Ask HN: Why does everything break immediately when starting a new language?

1 points by inputcoffee ↗ HN
Many years ago, when I started python, nothing would compile or install. It took many hours to get used to the virtual environment, different versions of python (2 and 3), and then the libraries to get hello world working reliably.

When I first started ruby, the rvm on the machine had not been updated. Got everything up and running, and then a new update in rails broke the hello world example.

When I started VueJS, npm simply would not install everything I needed. It kept telling me it was broken. I finally realized that it was running a slightly older version of nodejs and that changed everything.

Why does it take so many hours just to get the first basic hello world up?

Sure, after you've played with it, you know exactly what happened so well that you ignore the issue.

Its not the bother of learning it, it just seems something is fundamentally wrong with development if our tools are like this.

2 comments

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asynch8
I've had plenty of these situations aswell, and now a days I don't even bother if the process setting something up is too painful. That is why I highly enjoy writing scripting languages so much, because they are generally just out of the box ready to run after a small install. No extra thought required to begin developing.
PaulHoule
I think many developers have a "macho" attitude that things are supposed to be hard; if you are smart you can handle the complexity of C++, Kubernetes, etc...

Python is a special case. Python was easy long ago but the Python 2 to Python 3 transition was brutal, particularly because many Linux distributions used Python as a scripting language for system scripts. Thus "python" had to be python 2, and a generation of programmers got python 2 as a default and wrote more py 2 code when they should have been writing py 3.