4 ms·

This sort of attitude is the reason why the world doesn't move away from awful solutions. It is a testament to the lack of ability to see beyond your own nose.

This sort of attitude is the reason why the world doesn't move away from awful solutions. It is a testament to the lack of ability to see beyond your own nose. A lot of people who use Python, don't have the luxury of it being their "daily driver for years", so the conflicting documentation, decision paralysis and other problems that come with it end up being a huge time sink. A lot of non-programmers are being forced to use Python for various automation tasks. A lot of the CAD-software that construction engineers use, support Python-plugins. Network admins that have been configuring switches and routers on CLI for decades now have to configure them using Python. Look at "cargo" to see what the world could be like.

gen220 6y ago
You're right of course. Still, it's worth keeping in mind that Rust was born 20 years after Python was. Python was being written before Mosaic, Netscape, and Yahoo! were around. I think it can be forgiven for failing to conceive of a perfect package management system in 1990s. There were bigger fish to fry back then, so to speak. Over the decades (!) there have been many, well-documented attempts at coming up with a package management story. pip and virtualenv have been the obvious winners here for years. So, in conclusion, again you're right. But 30 years of history produces a lot of "conflicting documentation". It's only the last 10 years or so, that people have fought over the superiority of one language's package management ecosystem or another.
- oblio 6y ago
  This comment is rewriting Python history quite a bit. First of all, Python was created around 1989 yet Python 1.0 was released in 1994. Secondly, Python was a pretty obscure language until Python 2.0 (and even long after that...), released in 2000. So realistically, Python had "only" about 15 years of historical baggage :-) Also, cargo can be ignored because it's "new", but there was a lot of prior art in the area of good programming language specific package managers. CPAN (Perl) was launched in 1993. Maven (Java) was launched in 2004. Python just botched its package management story, that's it. Sometimes stuff happens just because it happens, there's no good excuse for how things are. Sad, but true.
  - dalke 6y ago
    Python's first posting to Usenet (v 0.9) was in 1991. The 1.0 Misc/ACKS from 1994 includes 50 or so external contributions to that point, showing that "1.0" is a somewhat artificial point. Rust's 1.0 was 2015, which is indeed "20 years after Python was" at 1.0, so how is gen220's comment a rewrite? I started using Python around 1.3, and advocating for its broader use (instead of Perl) by 1997. In 1998 I had a job using Python full-time. It was made easier because tools like SWIG already supported Python. Here's a talk I gave in 1999 - https://www.daylight.com/meetings/mug99/Dalke/index.html https://www.daylight.com/meetings/mug99/Dalke/index.html - and a writeup I did for Dr. Dobb's - https://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/making-c-extensions-more-pythonic/184404439 https://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/making-c-extensions-more-pythoni... . In 2000 I helped a company with the minor work to port their 1.5 code base to 2.x. So I certainly didn't see it as obscure in the 1.x days. But sure, I'm part of that environment so have a different view on things. If I use your definition, I'll argue that Rust is still "a pretty obscure language".
    - oblio 6y ago
      Rust is a pretty obscure language, when compared to Java, C#, C/C++, Javascript, Python, etc. Rust is a lot better known because of internet fame, which didn't really exist to this magnitude until well after the dotcom crash. My point is, Python's popularity took off in recent years, basically the last 10 years: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=python%2Cjava https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=python%2Cjava, primarily due to data science, machine learning, science in general. Around until 2005 at least, it was known as a friendly scripting language with a few web frameworks which were not that popular (Django was first released in 2005), as the language that was starting to be adopted by distributions for scripting tools (the first Ubuntu version was launched in 2004 and was one of the first distros to use it extensively). It wasn't really present for development work in most cases, DevOps was the domain of bash/Perl (for older stuff) or Ruby (for newer stuff). People tend to forget how obscure Python was before 2000, compared to the mainstream language it is today. And I say that as someone who likes Python ;-)
      - gen220 6y ago

gen220 6y ago

You're right of course. Still, it's worth keeping in mind that Rust was born 20 years after Python was. Python was being written before Mosaic, Netscape, and Yahoo! were around. I think it can be forgiven for failing to conceive of a perfect package management system in 1990s. There were bigger fish to fry back then, so to speak. Over the decades (!) there have been many, well-documented attempts at coming up with a package management story. pip and virtualenv have been the obvious winners here for years. So, in conclusion, again you're right. But 30 years of history produces a lot of "conflicting documentation". It's only the last 10 years or so, that people have fought over the superiority of one language's package management ecosystem or another.

oblio 6y ago
This comment is rewriting Python history quite a bit. First of all, Python was created around 1989 yet Python 1.0 was released in 1994. Secondly, Python was a pretty obscure language until Python 2.0 (and even long after that...), released in 2000. So realistically, Python had "only" about 15 years of historical baggage :-) Also, cargo can be ignored because it's "new", but there was a lot of prior art in the area of good programming language specific package managers. CPAN (Perl) was launched in 1993. Maven (Java) was launched in 2004. Python just botched its package management story, that's it. Sometimes stuff happens just because it happens, there's no good excuse for how things are. Sad, but true.
- dalke 6y ago
  Python's first posting to Usenet (v 0.9) was in 1991. The 1.0 Misc/ACKS from 1994 includes 50 or so external contributions to that point, showing that "1.0" is a somewhat artificial point. Rust's 1.0 was 2015, which is indeed "20 years after Python was" at 1.0, so how is gen220's comment a rewrite? I started using Python around 1.3, and advocating for its broader use (instead of Perl) by 1997. In 1998 I had a job using Python full-time. It was made easier because tools like SWIG already supported Python. Here's a talk I gave in 1999 - https://www.daylight.com/meetings/mug99/Dalke/index.html https://www.daylight.com/meetings/mug99/Dalke/index.html - and a writeup I did for Dr. Dobb's - https://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/making-c-extensions-more-pythonic/184404439 https://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/making-c-extensions-more-pythoni... . In 2000 I helped a company with the minor work to port their 1.5 code base to 2.x. So I certainly didn't see it as obscure in the 1.x days. But sure, I'm part of that environment so have a different view on things. If I use your definition, I'll argue that Rust is still "a pretty obscure language".
  - oblio 6y ago
    Rust is a pretty obscure language, when compared to Java, C#, C/C++, Javascript, Python, etc. Rust is a lot better known because of internet fame, which didn't really exist to this magnitude until well after the dotcom crash. My point is, Python's popularity took off in recent years, basically the last 10 years: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=python%2Cjava https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=python%2Cjava, primarily due to data science, machine learning, science in general. Around until 2005 at least, it was known as a friendly scripting language with a few web frameworks which were not that popular (Django was first released in 2005), as the language that was starting to be adopted by distributions for scripting tools (the first Ubuntu version was launched in 2004 and was one of the first distros to use it extensively). It wasn't really present for development work in most cases, DevOps was the domain of bash/Perl (for older stuff) or Ruby (for newer stuff). People tend to forget how obscure Python was before 2000, compared to the mainstream language it is today. And I say that as someone who likes Python ;-)
    - gen220 6y ago