[wenc]

Agreed. .NET Core and C# have been genuinely pleasant to work with from the start because of who was behind them — Anders Heijlsberg, who was author of Turbo Pascal and architect of Delphi. Anders is one of those guys with good taste and a practical streak.

Many of us dismissed Microsoft back in the 80s and 90s, not primarily because it was predatory but because most of its stuff felt like commoditized output, had rough edges and lacked taste (Java today continues to have this latter problem). It was a bad halo effect.

I’m primarily a Linux guy but I started out in .NET Framework a couple of years ago, and am now writing in .NET Core. The experience is definitely much more cohesive, more curated and less fragmented than the JS ecosystem.

Anaconda Python for the most part is pretty cohesive in the Python world. (The Python packaging story is somewhat broken still but it works — packaging is a very difficult problem and no one gets it right entirely unless one is willing to tolerate opinionated inflexible solutions).

R/Rstudio and CRAN pretty much just works.

[jhokanson]

Besides focusing on language 1 vs language 2 I think the author is also highlighting just how hard it is for people to get started in any language. You mentioned R/Rstudio ....

I just wanted to work through an example in a book that I'm reading that has corresponding R code. I type require(package_name) into the command window and that doesn't work. I look at the help for "require" and there is nothing about how to install packages - I would think a reference to the install packages command would be useful (they link to how to check, but nothing obvious on how to install, maybe I missed it). After some searching I find the command and it prompts about whether I want to use the source code or not (after a few reads I understood what was going on but it could be improved). Things started compiling and then I tried to run my package again, no luck. So then I try reinstalling and this time I noticed the error - something like "exited with non 0 status". Awesome. Looking a bit closer I noticed one of the dependencies was not installing. After trying to install the dependency manually I somehow realized it was only for R version > 3.6, I'm on 3.5. So I figured updating RStudio would fix the problem, no luck. It's not like RStudio advertises what version of R they are shipping with Rstudio .... Now I'm on someone's Linkedin post (wtf?) looking at how to upgrade R from within RStudio. They indicate that on my mac I should updateR (or wait, they say that turns out to be not good, so just install from CRAN). Hopefully that works. Do I try my luck with R v4? Nothing's going to break there right ...?

This isn't meant to be a "R is bad" rant. Maybe C# or some other language really does avoid these problems, I don't know. However my experience has been the problems the author mentions are a problem everywhere.

[wenc]

You make a good point -- these problems exist everywhere. It's a trade-off between flexibility and restrictions/constraints. Some platforms manage this balance better than others.

The other issue is that many of us don't notice certain roadblocks because we're so used to working around them. In your case, my first instinct would be to `install.package(package_name)` and if something breaks, I google the error. Usually within 3-4 steps I'm on my way. But if something has just been released and no one's hit issues yet, google might not turn up anything. So then I'd have to open an issue on their github page and wait.

CRAN generally does a good job curating -- it has strict policies like if a package submission doesn't pass tests and doesn't succeed on automated builds on x number of platforms, it doesn't make it to the repo. That said, I've experienced a few package breakages before so I also want to validate your experience.

While I'm here, I also want to say as a Linux person, I hate the "compile first" culture of UNIX based software -- I'm not sure where it originated, probably GNU and open-source? Sometimes I just want to install a library and have it work -- just give me static binaries, don't make me compile stuff. I really don't care about the source code. To me as an end user, the appeal of open-source is that the source is available if I want it, but most of the time I really don't.

I get really frustrated when some Python packages don't offer wheels, and when the compilation breaks I have to spend hours/day figuring out what went wrong. TensorFlow 1 was particularly bad -- even with Bazel, things would break between releases. It's a huge productivity suck.

[jhokanson]

My introduction to Python (a long time ago) and "batteries included" was going to some random guys website to download all the compiled packages I needed. Thanks Christoph!

[wenc]

Yes, most people using Python on Windows have encountered Christoph Gohlke's massive unofficial win32/64 Python wheel site at one point or another.

Not sure why the power-that-be don't just make that the official wheel site for Windows binaries.

[jagannathtech]

JS peasant here, I have not touched python recently but had to run a .py script to automate a task with FB website, sure enough had to download a couple of things from this person's website.