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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3668 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 23, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How the heck do you people program all day without pulling your hair out? I've spent 5+ hours just trying to clone a jupyter lab notebook from GitHub and open it, and good lord even with GPT's help it's like pulling teeth.

This is enough of a problem that GitHub Codespaces exists, advertised as solving exactly this problem, so it's not just you.

Some of this is just experience / familiarity with the tooling. While I agree with other comments in the thread that for professional development, I'm usually working on the same codebase for a while (and when I do spin up on a new codebase, they're sufficiently used to getting new hires set up that they have written instructions), for working in random open source repos, getting set up is usually a few quick rounds of installing whatever packages it complains are missing at most. And while not universal, a lot of GitHub repos do have instructions in how to get started working in the repo.

For a Python project, it's surprising you need anything more than the latest Python and pointing virtualenv at the requirements.txt file. I assume there were some dependencies that couldn't be installed that way for some reason.

(You mention in another comment that you're on Mac... which I've never used for development but I've fairly frequently heard of Linux devs switching to Mac saying the dev support is close enough to Linux and they like the rest of the OS better... so I assume it's plenty usable as a dev platform.)

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