Post #1506695

@maypop_neocities @don @noboilerplate Excel is a tool. Python is a tool creation kit. Engineers are not programmers, not in a traditional edit-source-code-and-pass-it-through-a-compiler-or-interpreter sense. There's no UI. There's a ton of constantly changing poorly coordinated infrastructure and all the headaches of screwing around trying to make Python work instead of doing actual productive brick-and-mortar engineering. Most engineers don't want to be programmers otherwise they'd already have installed Python on their own and be using it. My position as an engineering tool builder and resident software QA person is that engineers should be doing productive engineering work and not fighting with programming tools (unless they want to). As a result, the tools I ship have documentation and a clear user interface and are packaged for installation. The Python stuff still needs a virtualenv to be manually created (sadly unavoidable) but installs with a single pip command and zero use or knowledge of git. I'll happily mentor engineers who want to do traditional application development but otherwise I fiercely defend them against the nightmare of Python infrastructure, git, and similar time-wasting misery.