> With, say, Turbo Pascal you compiled your code into a .COM file, copied it to a floppy, and people ran it. Just your program. On their OS. No heaps of layers

> With, say, Turbo Pascal you compiled your code into a .COM file, copied it to a floppy, and people ran it. Just your program. On their OS. No heaps of layers of infrastructure and toolchains to get knotted into a tangle of failing interdependencies. How the fuck can it be so impossible to build stuff like that nowadays?!? Go or Java PicoCLI with graalvm gets you pretty close to this ideal. (Now Desktop GUI is a fallen idea and we are talking about CLIs). Anyway you're blaming the wrong thing. What pipx and venv do in python is fairly simple stuff. It's pretty reliable on standard setups. The problems if any come from C libraries. The NodeJS Electron stack / docker / kubernetes you can feel free to blame.