To be honest, I think the influence of the Ruby/Rails ecosystem is hurting Python. In the last few years, it's become impossible to run many Python projects wit

To be honest, I think the influence of the Ruby/Rails ecosystem is hurting Python. In the last few years, it's become impossible to run many Python projects without doing a pip install -r requirements.txt. That in itself would not be a problem, except that many pip packages are buggy and poorly maintained. Few people take the time to vet such libraries because the effort involved in a pip install is so low. The result is that we often spend hours configuring a buggy library instead of writing code that would do a better job solving our problems. "Convention over configuration" is no less important than it always was, but it's certainly less fashionable. There are exceptions. Django rest framework, for example, is an extremely mature, well-made library. But these are becoming less of a percentage of the whole and are harder to find in the chaff. And there are a few projects still carrying the torch--but typically these are old projects that have been around for a long time, still maintained by older developers who were writing Python when Python was young. We still have at least a decade before these old masters start retiring, so I don't think Python will die any time soon. But it has become more important than ever to be careful what you let into your dependencies.