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Python even has venv and other tooling for this sort of thing. Though, admittedly I seem to have dodged most of this by not seriously writing lots of python unt

Python even has venv and other tooling for this sort of thing. Though, admittedly I seem to have dodged most of this by not seriously writing lots of python until after Python3 had already happened. With any luck the maintainers of the language have factored that negative backlash into future language plans, but we'll see. Mostly I recoiled in horror at bash specifically, which in addition to bash version, also ends up invisibly depending on a whole bunch of external environment stuff that is also updating constantly. That's sortof bash's job, so it's still arguably the right tool to write that sort of interface, but it ends up incredibly fragile as a result. Porting a complex bash script to a different distro is a giant pain.

esseph 1y ago
uv means you have to download something and put it together. A container has that already done, including all supporting libraries. Edit: then ship the bash script in a container with a bash binary ;)
gbin 1y ago
How many times the virtualenv/pipenv/pyenv/... changed though? The package management also between wheels and setup and all the breakages. Even for somebody that did not aim to have python programs for 20y, python is definitely not a good example of a "pdf for programs"
- aragilar 1y ago
  I think if you had chased every single latest hotness then you would have hit lots of breakages, but depending on what you are doing and where you are running (and what dependencies you are using) then I think you could easily have something from 10-15 years ago work today. Part of the trick would have been to aware enough to pick the boring long-term options (but at some level that applies to every language and ecosystem), but the other part is understanding what the tools are actually doing and how they are maintained.
- integralid 1y ago
  I used virtualenv for the past 15 years and I don't recall it changing significantly. I don't get why people use new fancy tools like pipenv/pyenv/poetry/uv and then complain that there are too many tools to learn. There is nothing wrong with just using virtualenv. It has its warts but it always worked for me and it's stable.
  - esafak 1y ago
    If you see a wart report it: https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/issues/ https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/issues/
- timw4mail 1y ago
  I dislike Python for that reason. I don't love the offside-rule syntax, but compared to how often I have an issue with software written in Python due to some old/deprecated/broken packaging issue... I've lately been pretty deep into 3d printing, and basically all the software has Python...and breaks quite easily. Whether because of a new version of Pip with some new packaging rule, forced venvs...I really don't like dealing with Python software.

esseph 1y ago

uv means you have to download something and put it together. A container has that already done, including all supporting libraries. Edit: then ship the bash script in a container with a bash binary ;)

gbin 1y ago

How many times the virtualenv/pipenv/pyenv/... changed though? The package management also between wheels and setup and all the breakages. Even for somebody that did not aim to have python programs for 20y, python is definitely not a good example of a "pdf for programs"

aragilar 1y ago
I think if you had chased every single latest hotness then you would have hit lots of breakages, but depending on what you are doing and where you are running (and what dependencies you are using) then I think you could easily have something from 10-15 years ago work today. Part of the trick would have been to aware enough to pick the boring long-term options (but at some level that applies to every language and ecosystem), but the other part is understanding what the tools are actually doing and how they are maintained.
integralid 1y ago
I used virtualenv for the past 15 years and I don't recall it changing significantly. I don't get why people use new fancy tools like pipenv/pyenv/poetry/uv and then complain that there are too many tools to learn. There is nothing wrong with just using virtualenv. It has its warts but it always worked for me and it's stable.
- esafak 1y ago
  If you see a wart report it: https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/issues/ https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/issues/
timw4mail 1y ago
I dislike Python for that reason. I don't love the offside-rule syntax, but compared to how often I have an issue with software written in Python due to some old/deprecated/broken packaging issue... I've lately been pretty deep into 3d printing, and basically all the software has Python...and breaks quite easily. Whether because of a new version of Pip with some new packaging rule, forced venvs...I really don't like dealing with Python software.