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A comment on Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taug... by aequitas on Monday May 13, 2019 @06:18PM (#19904560)
With Docker at least everything is contained in the container. Which makes isolating and resetting environments a breeze. Something I worry about often is contaminating my system's 'state'. Which always leads to broken builds or incomplete build systems because a missing dependency is not spotted on your system because it was installed by some other tool some other time.

I tend to write my Makefiles to create as much of a local dev environment as possible for every project. Using Python virtualenv/Pipenv/Poetry, Ruby vendored dirs, custom Gopath per project (using direnv), etc. Most tools support some sort of isolation/localisation, but it's often just not on by default.

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Re:Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taug... by jrumbut on Monday May 13, 2019 @09:46PM (#19906050)
I wish more tools did this, I almost always want a local, self-contained environment for everything. The few times I don't actively want I don't see much pain in having one. A couple minutes setup time, maybe?

I have seriously considered hiring someone to audit and prune all the random little libraries and tools I've installed over the years for that one-off time I had to process a weird file format or wanted to try something from HN.

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Re:Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taug... by pknopf on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @03:25PM (#19912988)
To keep my system clean, I use Darch.

https://godarch.com/

Every boot is a fresh install. Any one-off only becomes persisted unless I add it to my recipes.

https://github.com/pauldotknopf/darch-recipes

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Re:Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taug... by alephu5 on Monday May 13, 2019 @10:11PM (#19906200)
Maybe you'd like NixOS?
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Re:Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taug... by jrumbut on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @09:35AM (#19909290)
I'm fascinated by NixOS and am following it, just haven't had a lot of time to dive in yet.

It does sound like the right idea. This is hypocritical as someone who doesn't use it but I hope more people use it.

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