5 ms·

I thought that too, but I think the tricky bit is if you're a non-python user, this isn't yet obvious. If you've never used Clojure and start a Clojure project

I thought that too, but I think the tricky bit is if you're a non-python user, this isn't yet obvious. If you've never used Clojure and start a Clojure project, you will almost definitely find advice telling you to use Leiningen. For Python, if you search online you might find someone saying to use uv, but also potentially venv, poetry or hatch. I definitely think uv is taking over, but its not yet ubiquitous. Ironically, I actually had a similar thing installing Go the other day. I'd never used Go before, and installed it using apt only to find that version was too old and I'd done it wrong. Although in that case, it was a much quicker resolution than I think anyone fighting with virtual environments would have.

houzi 9mo ago
Do you think a non-python user would piece it together if the shebang line reveals what tool to use?
- benrutter 9mo ago
  I think yes if that line was UV. But otherwise, of its just python, you have the issue that you need two tools, one for running scripts and one for managing dependencies and environments.
idoubtit 9mo ago
That's my experience. I'm not a Python developer, and installing Python programs has been a mess for decades, so I'd rather stay away from the language than try another new tool. Over the years, I've used setup.py, pip, pipenv (which kept crashing though it was an official recommendation), manual venv+pip (or virtualenv? I vaguely remember there were 2 similar tools and none was part of a minimal Python install). Does uv work in all of these cases? The uv doc pointed out by the GP is vague about legacy projects, though I've just skimmed through the long page. IIRC, Python tools didn't share their data across projects, so they could build the same heavy dependencies multiple times. I've also seen projects with incomplete dependencies (installed through Conda, IIRC) which were a major pain to get working. For many years, the only simple and sane way to run some Python code was in a Docker image, which has its own drawbacks.
- lexicality 9mo ago
  > Does uv work in all of these cases? Yes. The goal of uv is to defuck the python ecosystem and they're doing a very good job at it so far.
  - aeurielesn 9mo ago
    That's giving way too much credit to uv.
    - karel-3d 9mo ago
      uv is really that good.
      - hexo 9mo ago
        If so, ok, let's port this prototype to back to python and get rid of uv.
        llbeansandrice 9mo ago
        What does this comment mean? Port the dependency and virtual environment manager back to the language? Should we port npm “back” to node js?
        karel-3d 9mo ago
        Well, go does have the module management, including downloading new versions of itself, built-in into the `go` tool itself. It is really great. But I don't see this hapenning in python.
        hexo 9mo ago
        You don't see that happening because you don't want to.
        9mo ago
zahlman 9mo ago
> you might find someone saying to use uv, but also potentially venv, poetry or hatch. This is sort of like saying "You might find someone saying to drive a Ford, but also potentially internal combustion engine, Nissan or Hyundai".
- evilduck 9mo ago
  Only to those already steeped in Python. To an outsider they're all equally arbitrary non-descriptive words and there's not even obvious proper noun capitalization to tell apart a component from a tool brand.
  - zahlman 9mo ago
    It's always rather irritating to me that people make these complaints without trying to understand any of the under-the-hood stuff, because the ultimate conclusion is that it's somehow a bad thing that, on a FOSS project, multiple people tried to solve a problem concurrently.
    - NetMageSCW 9mo ago
      That’s especially ironic given that inside Python part of the philosophy is “There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.” So why does Python’s external environment seem more like something that escape from a Perl zoo?
      - kstrauser 9mo ago
        The one obvious way is the underlying virtualenv abstraction. Everything else just makes that part easier or more transparent.
      - zahlman 9mo ago
        What kstrauser said. But with much more detail: it seems complicated because * People refuse to learn basic concepts that are readily explained by many sources; e.g. https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2018/09/04/python-virtual-environments/ https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2018/09/04/python-virtual-envi... [0]. * People cling to memories of long-obsolete issues. When people point to XKCD 1987 they overlook that Python 2.x has been EOL for almost six years (and 3.6 for over four, but whatever)[1]; only Mac users have to worry about "homebrew" (which I understand was directly interfering with stuff back in the day) or "framework builds" of Python; easy_install is similarly a long-deprecated dinosaur that you also would never need once you have pip set up; and fewer and fewer people actually need Anaconda for anything[2][3]. * There is never just one way to do it, depending on your understanding of "do". Everyone will always imagine that the underlying functionality can be wrapped in a more user-friendly way, and they will have multiple incompatible ideas about what is the most user-friendly. But there is one obvious "way to do it", which is to set up the virtual environment and then launch the virtual environment's Python executable. Literally everything else is window dressing on top of that. The only thing that "activating" the environment does is configure environment variables so that `python` means the virtual environment's Python executable. All your various alternative tools are just presenting different ways to ensure that you run the correct Python (under the assumption that you don't want to remember a path to it, I guess) and to bundle up the virtual environment creation with some other development task. The Python community did explicitly provide for multiple people to provide such wrappers. This was not by providing the "15th competing standard". It was by providing the standard (really a set of standards designed to work together: the virtual environment support in the standard library, the PEPs describing `pyproject.toml`, and so on), which replaced a Wild West (where Setuptools was the sheriff and pip its deputy). [0]: By the way, this is by someone who doesn't like virtual environments and was one of the biggest backers of PEP 582. [1]: Of course, this is not Randall Munroe's fault. The comic dates to 2018, right in the middle of the period where the community was trying to sort things out and figure out how to not require the often problematic `setup.py` configuration for every project including pure-Python ones. [2]: The SciPy stack has been installable from wheels for almost everyone for quite some time and they were even able to get 3.12 wheels out promptly despite being hamstrung by the standard library `distutils` removal. [3]: Those who do need it, meanwhile, can generally live within that environment entirely.
regularfry 9mo ago
There's definitely a philosophical shift that you can observe happening over the last 12-15 years or so, where at the start you have the interpreter as the centre of the world and at the end there's an ecosystem management tool that you use to give yourself an interpreter (and virtual environments, and so on) per project. I think this properly kicked off with RVM, which needed to come into existence because you had this situation where the Ruby interpreter was going through incompatible changes, the versions on popular distributions were lagging, and Rails, the main reason people were turning to Ruby, was relatively militant about which interpreter versions it would support. Also, building the interpreter such that it would successfully run Rails wasn't trivial. Not that hard, but enough that a convenience wrapper mattered. So you had a whole generation of web devs coming up in an environment where the core language wasn't the first touchpoint, and there wasn't an assumption that you could (or should) rely on what you could apt-get install on the base OS. This is broadly an extremely good thing. But the critical thing that RVM did was that it broke the circular dependency at the core of the problem: it didn't itself depend on having a working ruby interpreter. Prior to that you could observe a sort of sniffiness about tools for a language which weren't implemented in that language, but RVM solved enough of the pain that it barged straight past that. Then you had similar tools popping up in other languages - nvm and leiningen are the first that spring to mind, but I'd also throw (for instance) asdf into the mix here - where the executable that you call to set up your environment has a '#!/bin/bash' shebang line. Go has sidestepped most of this because of three things: 1) rigorous backwards compatibility; 2) the simplest possible installation onramp; 3) being timed with the above timeline so that having a pre-existing `go` binary provided by your OS is unlikely unless you install it yourself. And none of those are true of Python. The backwards compatibility breaks in this period are legendary, you almost always do have a pre-existing Python to confuse things, and installing a new python without breaking that pre-existing Python, which your OS itself depends on, is a risk. Add to that the sniffiness I mentioned (which you can still see today on `uv` threads) and you've got a situation where Python is catching up to what other languages managed a decade ago. Again.
- bee_rider 9mo ago
  It is sort of funny, if we squint just the wrong way, “ecosystem management tool first, then think about interpreters” starts to look a lot like… a package manager, haha.
NeutralCrane 9mo ago
uv has been around for less than two years. It’s on track to become the default choice, it’s just a matter of time.
MarsIronPI 9mo ago
> If you've never used Clojure and start a Clojure project, you will almost definitely find advice telling you to use Leiningen. I thought the current best practice for Clojure was to use the shiny new built-in tooling? deps.edn or something like that?
- codemonkey-zeta 9mo ago
  deps.edn is becoming the default choice, yes. I interpreted the parent comment as saying "you will see advice to use leiningen (even though newer solutions exist, simply because it _was_ the default choice when the articles were written)"
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- fulafel 9mo ago
  Clojure CLI (aka deps.edn) came out in 2018 and in the survey "how do you manage your dependencies?" question crossed 50% usage in early 2020. So for 6-8 years now.
  - benrutter 9mo ago
    Ah woops! Sorry for my outdated clojure knowledge, this sounds cool though- I'll give it a go!

houzi 9mo ago

Do you think a non-python user would piece it together if the shebang line reveals what tool to use?

benrutter 9mo ago
I think yes if that line was UV. But otherwise, of its just python, you have the issue that you need two tools, one for running scripts and one for managing dependencies and environments.

idoubtit 9mo ago

That's my experience. I'm not a Python developer, and installing Python programs has been a mess for decades, so I'd rather stay away from the language than try another new tool. Over the years, I've used setup.py, pip, pipenv (which kept crashing though it was an official recommendation), manual venv+pip (or virtualenv? I vaguely remember there were 2 similar tools and none was part of a minimal Python install). Does uv work in all of these cases? The uv doc pointed out by the GP is vague about legacy projects, though I've just skimmed through the long page. IIRC, Python tools didn't share their data across projects, so they could build the same heavy dependencies multiple times. I've also seen projects with incomplete dependencies (installed through Conda, IIRC) which were a major pain to get working. For many years, the only simple and sane way to run some Python code was in a Docker image, which has its own drawbacks.

lexicality 9mo ago
> Does uv work in all of these cases? Yes. The goal of uv is to defuck the python ecosystem and they're doing a very good job at it so far.
- aeurielesn 9mo ago
  That's giving way too much credit to uv.
  - karel-3d 9mo ago
    uv is really that good.
    - hexo 9mo ago
      If so, ok, let's port this prototype to back to python and get rid of uv.
      - llbeansandrice 9mo ago
        What does this comment mean? Port the dependency and virtual environment manager back to the language? Should we port npm “back” to node js?
        karel-3d 9mo ago
        Well, go does have the module management, including downloading new versions of itself, built-in into the `go` tool itself. It is really great. But I don't see this hapenning in python.
        hexo 9mo ago
        You don't see that happening because you don't want to.
        9mo ago

zahlman 9mo ago

> you might find someone saying to use uv, but also potentially venv, poetry or hatch. This is sort of like saying "You might find someone saying to drive a Ford, but also potentially internal combustion engine, Nissan or Hyundai".

evilduck 9mo ago
Only to those already steeped in Python. To an outsider they're all equally arbitrary non-descriptive words and there's not even obvious proper noun capitalization to tell apart a component from a tool brand.
- zahlman 9mo ago
  It's always rather irritating to me that people make these complaints without trying to understand any of the under-the-hood stuff, because the ultimate conclusion is that it's somehow a bad thing that, on a FOSS project, multiple people tried to solve a problem concurrently.
  - NetMageSCW 9mo ago
    That’s especially ironic given that inside Python part of the philosophy is “There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.” So why does Python’s external environment seem more like something that escape from a Perl zoo?
    - kstrauser 9mo ago
      The one obvious way is the underlying virtualenv abstraction. Everything else just makes that part easier or more transparent.
    - zahlman 9mo ago
      What kstrauser said. But with much more detail: it seems complicated because * People refuse to learn basic concepts that are readily explained by many sources; e.g. https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2018/09/04/python-virtual-environments/ https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2018/09/04/python-virtual-envi... [0]. * People cling to memories of long-obsolete issues. When people point to XKCD 1987 they overlook that Python 2.x has been EOL for almost six years (and 3.6 for over four, but whatever)[1]; only Mac users have to worry about "homebrew" (which I understand was directly interfering with stuff back in the day) or "framework builds" of Python; easy_install is similarly a long-deprecated dinosaur that you also would never need once you have pip set up; and fewer and fewer people actually need Anaconda for anything[2][3]. * There is never just one way to do it, depending on your understanding of "do". Everyone will always imagine that the underlying functionality can be wrapped in a more user-friendly way, and they will have multiple incompatible ideas about what is the most user-friendly. But there is one obvious "way to do it", which is to set up the virtual environment and then launch the virtual environment's Python executable. Literally everything else is window dressing on top of that. The only thing that "activating" the environment does is configure environment variables so that `python` means the virtual environment's Python executable. All your various alternative tools are just presenting different ways to ensure that you run the correct Python (under the assumption that you don't want to remember a path to it, I guess) and to bundle up the virtual environment creation with some other development task. The Python community did explicitly provide for multiple people to provide such wrappers. This was not by providing the "15th competing standard". It was by providing the standard (really a set of standards designed to work together: the virtual environment support in the standard library, the PEPs describing `pyproject.toml`, and so on), which replaced a Wild West (where Setuptools was the sheriff and pip its deputy). [0]: By the way, this is by someone who doesn't like virtual environments and was one of the biggest backers of PEP 582. [1]: Of course, this is not Randall Munroe's fault. The comic dates to 2018, right in the middle of the period where the community was trying to sort things out and figure out how to not require the often problematic `setup.py` configuration for every project including pure-Python ones. [2]: The SciPy stack has been installable from wheels for almost everyone for quite some time and they were even able to get 3.12 wheels out promptly despite being hamstrung by the standard library `distutils` removal. [3]: Those who do need it, meanwhile, can generally live within that environment entirely.

regularfry 9mo ago

There's definitely a philosophical shift that you can observe happening over the last 12-15 years or so, where at the start you have the interpreter as the centre of the world and at the end there's an ecosystem management tool that you use to give yourself an interpreter (and virtual environments, and so on) per project. I think this properly kicked off with RVM, which needed to come into existence because you had this situation where the Ruby interpreter was going through incompatible changes, the versions on popular distributions were lagging, and Rails, the main reason people were turning to Ruby, was relatively militant about which interpreter versions it would support. Also, building the interpreter such that it would successfully run Rails wasn't trivial. Not that hard, but enough that a convenience wrapper mattered. So you had a whole generation of web devs coming up in an environment where the core language wasn't the first touchpoint, and there wasn't an assumption that you could (or should) rely on what you could apt-get install on the base OS. This is broadly an extremely good thing. But the critical thing that RVM did was that it broke the circular dependency at the core of the problem: it didn't itself depend on having a working ruby interpreter. Prior to that you could observe a sort of sniffiness about tools for a language which weren't implemented in that language, but RVM solved enough of the pain that it barged straight past that. Then you had similar tools popping up in other languages - nvm and leiningen are the first that spring to mind, but I'd also throw (for instance) asdf into the mix here - where the executable that you call to set up your environment has a '#!/bin/bash' shebang line. Go has sidestepped most of this because of three things: 1) rigorous backwards compatibility; 2) the simplest possible installation onramp; 3) being timed with the above timeline so that having a pre-existing `go` binary provided by your OS is unlikely unless you install it yourself. And none of those are true of Python. The backwards compatibility breaks in this period are legendary, you almost always do have a pre-existing Python to confuse things, and installing a new python without breaking that pre-existing Python, which your OS itself depends on, is a risk. Add to that the sniffiness I mentioned (which you can still see today on `uv` threads) and you've got a situation where Python is catching up to what other languages managed a decade ago. Again.

bee_rider 9mo ago
It is sort of funny, if we squint just the wrong way, “ecosystem management tool first, then think about interpreters” starts to look a lot like… a package manager, haha.

NeutralCrane 9mo ago

uv has been around for less than two years. It’s on track to become the default choice, it’s just a matter of time.

MarsIronPI 9mo ago

> If you've never used Clojure and start a Clojure project, you will almost definitely find advice telling you to use Leiningen. I thought the current best practice for Clojure was to use the shiny new built-in tooling? deps.edn or something like that?

codemonkey-zeta 9mo ago
deps.edn is becoming the default choice, yes. I interpreted the parent comment as saying "you will see advice to use leiningen (even though newer solutions exist, simply because it _was_ the default choice when the articles were written)"
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
fulafel 9mo ago
Clojure CLI (aka deps.edn) came out in 2018 and in the survey "how do you manage your dependencies?" question crossed 50% usage in early 2020. So for 6-8 years now.
- benrutter 9mo ago
  Ah woops! Sorry for my outdated clojure knowledge, this sounds cool though- I'll give it a go!