3 ms·

GOPATH is luckily soon dead.

throwaway894345 5y ago
Which is kind of remarkable. Python still seems to try to support every package manager and format that ever existed, and that’s part of why packaging in Python is so awful. Nice to see a language that can move forward with such a major change in such a short time and with relatively little pain.
- btmcnellis 5y ago
  Python is a lot older and a lot more widely used, so it’s not as easy to just change things.
  - eikenberry 5y ago
    Python3 is pretty close to Go in age and was a purposely compatibility breaking, so it could have easily changed things at that point and they definitely knew about the problem at that point.
    - mkl95 5y ago
      The difference between 2 and 3 is way smaller than people make it out to be. I migrated a large Python 2.7 project to Python 3.8 and it wasn't a particularly painful experience. I feel that way more effort should have been directed at making 2 and 3 compatible.
      - throwaway894345 5y ago
        It took more than a decade for the ecosystem to migrate. IIRC, a lot of effort went into making them compatible, but some things are just fundamentally incompatible and also very difficult to automate (e.g., string encodings).
        mkl95 5y ago
        I learnt Python in 2013, when Python 3 still had some serious growing pains. I switched from 2 to 3 almost overnight circa 2015 or 2016. The last few years I cannot help but feel they were very close to making 2 and 3 play nice together, but the idea ironically lost traction because of how much Python 3 adoption had accelerated.
        throwaway894345 5y ago
        Python 3 is easy for a Python 2 programmer to pick up, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to port large systems from one to the other.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  Yeah, that's the thing about having so little existing software, especially stuff that has been essentially finished for a decade or longer. If Go is successful for any significant period of time, that will change.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    Go is pretty established. By the time this module change was made, a huge swath of the cloud ecosystem had been written in Go, including core components like Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, etc. It’s also the default language for which Terraform and Kubernetes extensions are written, as well as the default language for container infrastructure (i.e., container runtimes, etc). I think Python’s packaging story is a bummer in part because Python leans so hard on C which doesn’t have a standard build system or a sane approach to building or packaging.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Go is pretty established Sure, and when it has been “pretty established” for a couple of decades, it’ll have a chance to have the community weight of important legacy projects that Python has.
      - throwaway894345 5y ago
        This is a canned argument for any criticism of older programming languages. First of all, it’s not much of a consolation to users that the packaging and performance are bad “because the language is old”, and secondly Python had already had half a dozen significant changes to its packaging format and ecosystem by the time it was Go’s age (distutils, cheeseshop/pypi, PEP241, setuptools, eggs, easy_install, etc). Note that by this time, Python’s package management was far more complex than Go’s and it was also far more painful (and indeed, still is far more painful). Note that Go deprecated GOPATH when the language was already 9 years old, at a point when it was quite a lot older and more widely used than Python’s myriad package formats which are still supported today. We can say “No fair! Go has the benefit of hindsight!” and true enough, but again as a user, I don’t much care—I just want the tool that’s going to solve my problem with the least headache. And this isn’t even touching on the Python 2-3 saga, which began when Python 2 was merely 8 years old and lasted for more than a decade. If you want to argue that we should use the Python 1.0 release date for our comparison, then fine—call me in ~4 years if the Go ecosystem is on the precipice of a suite of breaking changes which constitute an existential crisis. My money says that wonky happen.

Which is kind of remarkable. Python still seems to try to support every package manager and format that ever existed, and that’s part of why packaging in Python is so awful. Nice to see a language that can move forward with such a major change in such a short time and with relatively little pain.

btmcnellis 5y ago
Python is a lot older and a lot more widely used, so it’s not as easy to just change things.
- eikenberry 5y ago
  Python3 is pretty close to Go in age and was a purposely compatibility breaking, so it could have easily changed things at that point and they definitely knew about the problem at that point.
  - mkl95 5y ago
    The difference between 2 and 3 is way smaller than people make it out to be. I migrated a large Python 2.7 project to Python 3.8 and it wasn't a particularly painful experience. I feel that way more effort should have been directed at making 2 and 3 compatible.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      It took more than a decade for the ecosystem to migrate. IIRC, a lot of effort went into making them compatible, but some things are just fundamentally incompatible and also very difficult to automate (e.g., string encodings).
      - mkl95 5y ago
        I learnt Python in 2013, when Python 3 still had some serious growing pains. I switched from 2 to 3 almost overnight circa 2015 or 2016. The last few years I cannot help but feel they were very close to making 2 and 3 play nice together, but the idea ironically lost traction because of how much Python 3 adoption had accelerated.
        throwaway894345 5y ago
        Python 3 is easy for a Python 2 programmer to pick up, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to port large systems from one to the other.
dragonwriter 5y ago
Yeah, that's the thing about having so little existing software, especially stuff that has been essentially finished for a decade or longer. If Go is successful for any significant period of time, that will change.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  Go is pretty established. By the time this module change was made, a huge swath of the cloud ecosystem had been written in Go, including core components like Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, etc. It’s also the default language for which Terraform and Kubernetes extensions are written, as well as the default language for container infrastructure (i.e., container runtimes, etc). I think Python’s packaging story is a bummer in part because Python leans so hard on C which doesn’t have a standard build system or a sane approach to building or packaging.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Go is pretty established Sure, and when it has been “pretty established” for a couple of decades, it’ll have a chance to have the community weight of important legacy projects that Python has.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      This is a canned argument for any criticism of older programming languages. First of all, it’s not much of a consolation to users that the packaging and performance are bad “because the language is old”, and secondly Python had already had half a dozen significant changes to its packaging format and ecosystem by the time it was Go’s age (distutils, cheeseshop/pypi, PEP241, setuptools, eggs, easy_install, etc). Note that by this time, Python’s package management was far more complex than Go’s and it was also far more painful (and indeed, still is far more painful). Note that Go deprecated GOPATH when the language was already 9 years old, at a point when it was quite a lot older and more widely used than Python’s myriad package formats which are still supported today. We can say “No fair! Go has the benefit of hindsight!” and true enough, but again as a user, I don’t much care—I just want the tool that’s going to solve my problem with the least headache. And this isn’t even touching on the Python 2-3 saga, which began when Python 2 was merely 8 years old and lasted for more than a decade. If you want to argue that we should use the Python 1.0 release date for our comparison, then fine—call me in ~4 years if the Go ecosystem is on the precipice of a suite of breaking changes which constitute an existential crisis. My money says that wonky happen.