So I’m no expert, but I have been a hobbyist C and Rust dev for a while now, and I’ve installed tons of programs from GitHub and whatnot that required manual compilation or other hoops to jump through, but I am constantly befuddled installing python apps. They seem to always need a very specific (often outdated) version of python, require a bunch of venv nonsense, googling gives tons of outdated info that no longer works, and generally seem incredibly not portable. As someone who doesn’t work in python, it seems more obtuse than any other language’s ecosystem. Why is it like this?

  • tyler@programming.dev
    0·
    16 days ago

    I think you have got to be meme’ing. You literally wrote 7 paragraphs about how to build something for python when for other languages it’s literally a single command. For Ruby, it’s literally bundle. Nothing else. Doesn’t matter if it’s got C packages or not. Doesn’t matter if it’s windows or not. Doesn’t matter if you have a different project one folder over that uses an older gem or not. Doesn’t matter if it’s 15 years old or not. One command.

    Just for comparison for gradle it’s ./gradlew build For maven is mvn install For Elixir it’s mix deps.get mix compile For node it’s npm install

    every other language it’s hardly more than 1 command.

    Python is the only language that thinks that it’s even slightly acceptable to have virtual environments when it was universally decided upon decades ago to be a tremendously bad idea. Just like node_modules which also was known to be a bad idea before npm decided to try it out again, only for it to be proven to be a bad idea right off the bat. And all the other python build tools have agreed that virtual envs are bad.