[dcosson]

It's honestly terrible for newbies. If they try to use it, there's no pip included. So then they easy_install all their libraries which installs things into different places than most python devs will be used to. Or they easy_install pip first. But even still, everything is installing to system paths, so when they try to install things it fails with permission errors. They find a stack overflow post that says just "sudo" everything and they go to town. And there's no way to reset anything when it gets borked either because it's the system install.

Compare that to "brew install python". Now you have the most up to date version, with the right permissions for your user, that you can always brew uninstall and reinstall later if you need a different version or a clean install.

[adrianN]

So you're saying Apple should adopt brew as default package manager and install all system tools using brew? I could get behind that, but just dropping everything without replacement makes it harder for first-time programmers.

[Fnoord]

That, with analytics off by default. Also, Homebrew depends on Ruby, and Apple just ditched that

[ch4s3]

Homebrew installs it’s own ruby when necessary.

[wyclif]

you can always brew uninstall and reinstall later if you need a different version

That is the wrong way to do it. Just install pyenv/pipenv to manage different Python versions. It's dead simple to maintain system Python, Python 2.7x, and Python3.7.3 that way.

[dcosson]

Yes but I’ve never seen someone new to programming that bothered trying to figure out pyenv or similar. Even a lot of moderately experienced devs don’t bother with it. I guess it’s hard to realize the benefits of keeping environments organized until you’ve been burned by it.

[willio58]

Wrong way? I’ve used this method successfully for years.

[wyclif]

Sure you can do that, but why would you want to install and re-install different versions of Python depending on what you needed at the moment? Pyenv manages all that nicely. You can have 2x and 3x side by side without having to reinstall and uninstall anything.

[Sean1708]

> You can have 2x and 3x side by side without having to reinstall and uninstall anything.

You can do that anyway, `python` is always Python 2 (except on Arch where `python` is Python 3 and the Python 2 executable is `python2`) and the Python 3 executable is called `python3`. `pyenv` is more for keeping multiple minor versions of the same major version (e.g. Python 3.6 and Python 3.7) around at the same time.

[wyclif]

`pyenv` is more for keeping multiple minor versions of the same major version (e.g. Python 3.6 and Python 3.7) around at the same time

Actually, it doesn't have to be multiple minor versions, it can be any version–major or minor. It can even be Iron Python or Jython. Anyway, the point is that it's smart not to touch system Python on macOS. So when I run:

`$ pyenv versions`

My output is:

`system

`2.7.16

`* 3.7.3 (set by /Users/wyclif/.pyenv/version)

Dead simple and easy to use. Much better than overwriting and reinstalling when you need a different version for a specific project.

[xapata]

Or conda, which I prefer to pipenv + pyenv.

[toyg]

Homebrew is not perfect though - it doesn't handle multi-versions (e.g. 3.7 and 3.8 running in parallel), which were working fine with Apple's Framework mechanism. Pyenv is superior in that respect (although it's fundamentally a hack). But I agree that brew does a better job for newbies than Apple's system python.