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I think package management is something so important you either have to get it right on the first released version of the language, or never release an official

by rpigab 4y ago

I think package management is something so important you either have to get it right on the first released version of the language, or never release an official one at all. So if you look at C, there was basically no internet or even HTTP, so if they wanted to fetch + store dependencies from centralized repositories, it would have been difficult and then need to change a lot over the years. Python is the worst to me, I love the language, but I hate the tooling, managing installations, packages, modules, etc. Sometimes languages are relased with just a spec and don't want to force any choice of tool or way of doing things on you, so you just manage that yourself or create third party tools, and that's where it gets wild in every direction, but it also creates room for new ideas, innovation, which later are used in "official" modern package managers built in the language tools. And yeah, nowadays I use Rust even for scripting stuff that would be easier to do in Python, just because I don't want to create a thousandth virtualenv, find a lib that does what I want but it's for Python<3.6 ou Python2 etc., so in the end it's easier in Rust even though some new libs require nightly builds of the toolchain.

cageface 4y ago
I’ve also found it not that much harder to do scripting kinds of things in Rust vs Ruby or Python. It’s a bit of extra effort of course but having a nice self contained binary at the end is pretty handy.
- jonfw 4y ago
  We've been using Go to build CLI tools rather than writing scripts for certain tasks recently, and I've found that Golang is very well suited for that. we use the urfave/cli library, which works great, and gets you a ton of things for almost free (passing and documenting flags and arguments) that you just don't get easily in bash
junon 4y ago
I was going to disagree that Python's is the worst, but then I thought about it and.. yeah, it's up there. I think there are definitely some other ecosystems with worse package management systems but they're certainly not as mainstream as Python.
- rpigab 4y ago
  Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1987/ https://xkcd.com/1987/ As I've said, I still love it and use it a lot, easy to write, easy to explain and share, easy to run without dependencies and if your code runs the same on different versions of Python, but hard to choose which type of virtualenv you want to use, then pick the right versions of dependencies that work together (if you have big dependencies like in data science for example, and some of them are less maintained than others, which happens because the Python ecosystem is rich but people start projects and move on, happens everywhere but because it's easy to start a project in Python, it's also easy to leave it unmaintained). I love explaining Python code to non coders!

by rpigab 4y ago

cageface 4y ago

I’ve also found it not that much harder to do scripting kinds of things in Rust vs Ruby or Python. It’s a bit of extra effort of course but having a nice self contained binary at the end is pretty handy.

jonfw 4y ago
We've been using Go to build CLI tools rather than writing scripts for certain tasks recently, and I've found that Golang is very well suited for that. we use the urfave/cli library, which works great, and gets you a ton of things for almost free (passing and documenting flags and arguments) that you just don't get easily in bash

junon 4y ago

I was going to disagree that Python's is the worst, but then I thought about it and.. yeah, it's up there. I think there are definitely some other ecosystems with worse package management systems but they're certainly not as mainstream as Python.

rpigab 4y ago
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1987/ https://xkcd.com/1987/ As I've said, I still love it and use it a lot, easy to write, easy to explain and share, easy to run without dependencies and if your code runs the same on different versions of Python, but hard to choose which type of virtualenv you want to use, then pick the right versions of dependencies that work together (if you have big dependencies like in data science for example, and some of them are less maintained than others, which happens because the Python ecosystem is rich but people start projects and move on, happens everywhere but because it's easy to start a project in Python, it's also easy to leave it unmaintained). I love explaining Python code to non coders!