It's often easier(!) to configure a Docker image than the corresponding package, or set of packages, in your typical distro.

My original reply was going to be something along the lines of "Bwahahahaha" followed by a comparison of how many seconds it takes to `pip3 install torch` vs how many hours you'd rip your hair out trying to get that running in Docker, let alone on a GPU, and let alone in a way that you can actually develop on it.

Perhaps it's easier to say, "We're not smart." Like Racket, Docker is a marvelous tool, and I'm sure a lot of smart people use it in some incredible ways.

I'll be 34 in Feb. Do I want to spend a month trying to force myself to use Docker for no apparent reason?

At my first job (gamedev), one of my coding heroes happened to work there. One thing he said really bugged me: "Shaders are a young person's game." By "hero" I mean that he single handedly wrote most of the Planetside 1 client code, as well as having developed many other titles that I grew up playing on MPlayer. (God help you if you know what MPlayer was.)

I tried explaining to him, no no, you see, it's not so bad! You can do it! I believe in you. Once you put in a little effort, you'll understand all the parts, and you'll see there's really not that much to it.

Yeah, uh, I was 19. He was like 40. I get it now.

I've personally deployed multiple services to production whose reliability can be measured in years: https://status.shawwn.com/

Sure, none of those are too impressive. Except the one I can't talk about, ha. But they're all variations on "get the server running, make sure the process is simple, make sure it's fail-safe, and put failsafes in place to notice if it breaks."

To my surprise, they almost never break. Isn't that marvelous? Here's me, someone inching closer and closer over the hill, delivering robust software that lasts years. Hell, you can even see for yourself: https://tags.tagpls.com/uptime

508d 00h 04m 14s

Not bad.

Sure, I'm being unfair. Because you'll rightly say that there's a world of difference between this and the situations DOcker's designed to solve.

And yet, as I go from company to company, I keep being surprised to find zero people using Docker. Isn't that strange? My wife just got a job at a YC co. I'll ask her whether anyone there uses Docker either. Maybe they do.

Docker's stolen days of my life for no gain. Painful days, because they were days when I was really into hacking, and I could've been busily building a big beaver dam instead of learning infrastructure that none of my colleagues ended up using.

Docker is a time vampire. It's "Nerd Snipe: The Game." You'll want to play with it, and it'll give you just enough happiness to keep you going. But, like a cat, the love is one-way. If Docker were a person, they would totally ditch you on your birthday.

It was much more satisfying to write this than to spend that time staring at yet another damn variation of "how do I forward the port properly?" torrent of blog posts from the legions of developers that Docker has managed to curse, by making the impressive decision to eschew simplicity in favor of being Smart with a capital-S.

But hey, Docker will be around longer than I will, I'm sure. So it'll get the last laugh. In seriousness though, you can get by without it, which is pretty remarkable -- almost as remarkable as it was to try out vagrant and discover that it's the polar opposite of Docker's philosophy.

The difference is easy to spot: Vagrant just works.