The ignorance of many comments in this thread astound me.
Sure, setting up a development environment for your small pet project is easy. But as soon as you start working on software that has been maintained for a few years, dependencies start to grow. A typical old Java project depends on Gradle (or Maven, or even Ant), an outdated JDK, Eclipse, Protobuf tooling, XML tooling, custom tooling, you name it. Next, your project may require linting, formatting, and will be checked by some third party services. Recently, Docker and friends have joined the party, and a web based frontend requires TypeScript, a framework, Webpack, and many other libraries and tools.
Joining a team with such a project is not an easy task. In a typical 500,000 line code project, it may take a whole day or more to get the basic system up and running. All the dependencies may break in a myriad of ways, and can result in a lot of unnecessary problem hunting.
Sure, there are tools to automate setting up the build environment. But even those require maintenance, and setting things up for quick onboarding requires a lot of time, and if done wrong, will take even more time to get right later.
It would save a lot of money and effort if I could have a reproducible development environment, and I would not mind if that is in the cloud or not.
> A typical old Java project depends on Gradle (or Maven, or even Ant), an outdated JDK, Eclipse, Protobuf tooling, XML tooling, custom tooling, you name it. Next, your project may require linting, formatting, and will be checked by some third party services. Recently, Docker and friends have joined the party, and a web based frontend requires TypeScript, a framework, Webpack, and many other libraries and tools.
You say that as if it were a God-given truth that that is how things must be, or maybe even as if it were a good thing that that is how things are. Which could hardly be further from the truth. The solution isn't to cover all that shit up with yet another layer of cruft, but to get rid of most of this fricking cruft.
Sure, setting up a development environment for your small pet project is easy. But as soon as you start working on software that has been maintained for a few years, dependencies start to grow. A typical old Java project depends on Gradle (or Maven, or even Ant), an outdated JDK, Eclipse, Protobuf tooling, XML tooling, custom tooling, you name it. Next, your project may require linting, formatting, and will be checked by some third party services. Recently, Docker and friends have joined the party, and a web based frontend requires TypeScript, a framework, Webpack, and many other libraries and tools.
Joining a team with such a project is not an easy task. In a typical 500,000 line code project, it may take a whole day or more to get the basic system up and running. All the dependencies may break in a myriad of ways, and can result in a lot of unnecessary problem hunting.
Sure, there are tools to automate setting up the build environment. But even those require maintenance, and setting things up for quick onboarding requires a lot of time, and if done wrong, will take even more time to get right later.
It would save a lot of money and effort if I could have a reproducible development environment, and I would not mind if that is in the cloud or not.