3 ms·

The age also means Python has had plenty of time to come up with something new!

by twic 7y ago

BerislavLopac 7y ago
And it (and by "it" I mean the Python community) absolutely did! The main problem that it has come up with numerous different somethings that have been competing to become standards, across a wide range of related, but separate areas (packaging, versioning, environments...), and only a few of them (like pip) managed to become partial (but not at all universal) de facto standards.
brettcannon 7y ago
I'm not sure how old you are, but if you don't know the name "Borland" you might not realize how novel it is to have a compiler on every major OS. While Python's age means it has been around to see a lot of changes occur, that also means it had pre-existing practices and code to also consider whenever a shift in the industry occurred. Plus in hindsight things look obvious, but during the transition it isn't obvious what will stick and what won't. It's pretty remarkable that things have continued to function since my 17 years with Python alone have seen things like: - Compilers becoming available on all OSs - Linux becoming a thing - Laptops becoming common - Smartphones - Web-based email clients As I have said a few times in comments on this thread, it's fine to feel like there's room for improvement, but trying to "stick it" to Python and its packaging ecosystem in some way for not being perfect is pointless for you and demotivating for those who are actually in a position to try to make things better for you (and even if you aren't a Python user you should care to some extent about it as Instagram runs on Python and thus it is helping to deliver you those cat photos while you're stuck at home ).
- jshen 7y ago
  I’ve been doing this for over 20 years. It’s no excuse, python should have a solution.
  - toyg 7y ago
    It sounds a bit more understandable if you rephrase it as "a small group of largely unpaid volunteers should find a solution for which millions of users and several billion-dollar businesses will happily abandon their current long-running and well-tested solutions".
    - jshen 7y ago
      First, programmers have choices, and Python's lack of a good user experience on this front will turn off people that have better options with other languages which have found a way to deliver a better experience given the same constraints as python. Second, there is the python foundation, which funds people to work on areas of python. This should be a priority, and can be done by paid contributors.
takluyver 7y ago
People in the Python ecosystem have come up with plenty of new things over the years - eggs, wheels, conda, poetry... Coming up with something new is the easy bit. Getting everyone to agree that a new thing is better and stop using/recommending other things is much harder - almost impossible, if those other things serve some use cases fairly well. The fragmented ecosystem is one of the main complaints about Python packaging today. And that's really tricky, because the main way the open source world knows to solve problems is to create new tools, and that doesn't help when the problem is 'too many tools'.

The age also means Python has had plenty of time to come up with something new!

by twic 7y ago

The age also means Python has had plenty of time to come up with something new!

And it (and by "it" I mean the Python community) absolutely did! The main problem that it has come up with numerous different somethings that have been competing to become standards, across a wide range of related, but separate areas (packaging, versioning, environments...), and only a few of them (like pip) managed to become partial (but not at all universal) de facto standards.

brettcannon 7y ago

I'm not sure how old you are, but if you don't know the name "Borland" you might not realize how novel it is to have a compiler on every major OS. While Python's age means it has been around to see a lot of changes occur, that also means it had pre-existing practices and code to also consider whenever a shift in the industry occurred. Plus in hindsight things look obvious, but during the transition it isn't obvious what will stick and what won't. It's pretty remarkable that things have continued to function since my 17 years with Python alone have seen things like: - Compilers becoming available on all OSs - Linux becoming a thing - Laptops becoming common - Smartphones - Web-based email clients As I have said a few times in comments on this thread, it's fine to feel like there's room for improvement, but trying to "stick it" to Python and its packaging ecosystem in some way for not being perfect is pointless for you and demotivating for those who are actually in a position to try to make things better for you (and even if you aren't a Python user you should care to some extent about it as Instagram runs on Python and thus it is helping to deliver you those cat photos while you're stuck at home ).

jshen 7y ago
I’ve been doing this for over 20 years. It’s no excuse, python should have a solution.
- toyg 7y ago
  It sounds a bit more understandable if you rephrase it as "a small group of largely unpaid volunteers should find a solution for which millions of users and several billion-dollar businesses will happily abandon their current long-running and well-tested solutions".
  - jshen 7y ago
    First, programmers have choices, and Python's lack of a good user experience on this front will turn off people that have better options with other languages which have found a way to deliver a better experience given the same constraints as python. Second, there is the python foundation, which funds people to work on areas of python. This should be a priority, and can be done by paid contributors.

takluyver 7y ago

People in the Python ecosystem have come up with plenty of new things over the years - eggs, wheels, conda, poetry... Coming up with something new is the easy bit. Getting everyone to agree that a new thing is better and stop using/recommending other things is much harder - almost impossible, if those other things serve some use cases fairly well. The fragmented ecosystem is one of the main complaints about Python packaging today. And that's really tricky, because the main way the open source world knows to solve problems is to create new tools, and that doesn't help when the problem is 'too many tools'.