[trashfindhunter]

> John gives up. Concludes never to touch Node, npm, or ES6 modules with a barge pole. > The End. > Note that John is a computer scientist that knows a fair bit about the Web: He had Node & npm installed, he knew what MIME types are, he could start a localhost when needed. What hope do actual novices have?

The ones who don't give up on the first night will likely have more luck (try, try again).

[alanbernstein]

Or maybe John found it less aggravating to find or create another implementation in a different language?

[fastball]

Well if he followed internet trends he'd try Rust next, which doesn't exactly have the most straightforward package system either.

[DangitBobby]

As someone with little experience in Rust, I can say that I have had no trouble downloading, compiling, and running binaries from a crate. The only hard part for me is organizing my own crate correctly.

[saghm]

Rust is definitely known for having a sharp learning curve, but I'm not sure what you mean about the package system. I've onboarded several people onto Rust at my job over the past year, and the package system has never been an issue for any of them.

[jtdev]

Or, you know, Python, Ruby, Java, Go, C#, Swift, Kotlin, etc., etc., or any number of other languages that are less of a foot-gun full of bizarre issues, poorly maintained packages, and droves of Jr. devs eager to do clever things that make the language and ecosystem psychotic.

[TechBro8615]

Python is good at many things, but packaging is not one of them. The best python package manager at the moment is Poetry, and it drew most of its inspiration from npm and yarn...

Python packaging has historically been so bad that dotcloud invented docker in an attempt to make it usable.

[Carpetsmoker]

But at least I can just download a .py file (or a bunch of files) and just import them. Perhaps the biggest frustration/pain point in this article isn't npm as such, but that you can't "just" use some JS module.

[ggregoire]

> But at least I can just download a .py file (or a bunch of files) and just import them.

Just importing doesn't seem to work for millions of people:

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4383571/importing-files-... (1.5m views)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14132789/relative-import... (215k views)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72852/how-to-do-relative... (325k views)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1918539/can-anyone-expla... (100k views)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1260792/import-a-file-fr... (480k views)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7505988/importing-from-a... (136k views)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9252543/importerror-cann... (700k views)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2325923/how-to-fix-impor... (430k views)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15514593/importerror-no-... (250k views)

[yawaramin]

> But at least I can just download a .py file (or a bunch of files) and just import them

Unless you have a Python version locally that doesn't support some features used in said .py file...

[dceddia]

Nothing would stop you from doing that (import thing from ‘./downloaded.js’) but it’s Just Not Done That Way and packages aren’t really built with that in mind, so it probably wouldn’t work very well in practice.

[TechBro8615]

You definitely can. On the server side, you can literally do that. On the client side, you can "import" one with a script tag, and increasingly you can use modules in browsers too.

[runawaybottle]

Woah woah woah, show me a Java project repo that we’re all going to be able to install here without running into an issue.

I ran into one with Go imports just the other day, and since I’m new to it, it wasn’t a 10 minute google fix.

[FridgeSeal]

I've played around with a bunch of languages, and Rusts' is unequivocally the best experience I've had so far. Cargo works as intended, literally straight out of the box, crates.io and the Cargo.toml was straightforward to figure out. Certainly way less frustrating than figuring out how to use Python virtualenv when I was first starting.

[fastball]

I meant how imports work within a package, since that is what was being discussed in the article.

Nested `mod`s with sometimes `pub` and then `use` for other stuff certainly seems more complex to me than `import X from P`.

Package/crate management is fairly trivial in both cases, yes. `npm i [package]` isn't exactly a difficult process either.

[guitarbill]

that's fair, but newer languages like Rust have the benefit of hindsight, and can mandate one way to do things. to be clear, i'm all for that.

i don't think it's possible to do that any more with Python, the genie is out of the bottle. but you can get close with things like Black (auto-formatting) and Poetry (nicer deps mgmt and so much more). of course, how would a beginner know this? hopefully some day tools like that will become the default answers

[jack1243star]

Cargo (Rust's equivalent to npm) is quite good.

[NightlyDev]

To be fair, Rust is a dream compared to JS.

[trashfindhunter]

He wouldn't be the first. Speaking of which, whatever happened to Dart?