[infraredcabbage]

This sort of attitude is the reason why the world doesn't move away from awful solutions. It is a testament to the lack of ability to see beyond your own nose.

A lot of people who use Python, don't have the luxury of it being their "daily driver for years", so the conflicting documentation, decision paralysis and other problems that come with it end up being a huge time sink.

A lot of non-programmers are being forced to use Python for various automation tasks. A lot of the CAD-software that construction engineers use, support Python-plugins. Network admins that have been configuring switches and routers on CLI for decades now have to configure them using Python.

Look at "cargo" to see what the world could be like.

[gen220]

You're right of course.

Still, it's worth keeping in mind that Rust was born 20 years after Python was. Python was being written before Mosaic, Netscape, and Yahoo! were around. I think it can be forgiven for failing to conceive of a perfect package management system in 1990s. There were bigger fish to fry back then, so to speak.

Over the decades (!) there have been many, well-documented attempts at coming up with a package management story. pip and virtualenv have been the obvious winners here for years.

So, in conclusion, again you're right. But 30 years of history produces a lot of "conflicting documentation". It's only the last 10 years or so, that people have fought over the superiority of one language's package management ecosystem or another.

[oblio]

This comment is rewriting Python history quite a bit.

First of all, Python was created around 1989 yet Python 1.0 was released in 1994. Secondly, Python was a pretty obscure language until Python 2.0 (and even long after that...), released in 2000. So realistically, Python had "only" about 15 years of historical baggage :-)

Also, cargo can be ignored because it's "new", but there was a lot of prior art in the area of good programming language specific package managers. CPAN (Perl) was launched in 1993. Maven (Java) was launched in 2004.

Python just botched its package management story, that's it. Sometimes stuff happens just because it happens, there's no good excuse for how things are. Sad, but true.

[dalke]

Python's first posting to Usenet (v 0.9) was in 1991. The 1.0 Misc/ACKS from 1994 includes 50 or so external contributions to that point, showing that "1.0" is a somewhat artificial point.

Rust's 1.0 was 2015, which is indeed "20 years after Python was" at 1.0, so how is gen220's comment a rewrite?

I started using Python around 1.3, and advocating for its broader use (instead of Perl) by 1997. In 1998 I had a job using Python full-time. It was made easier because tools like SWIG already supported Python. Here's a talk I gave in 1999 - https://www.daylight.com/meetings/mug99/Dalke/index.html - and a writeup I did for Dr. Dobb's - https://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/making-c-extensions-more-pythoni... .

In 2000 I helped a company with the minor work to port their 1.5 code base to 2.x.

So I certainly didn't see it as obscure in the 1.x days.

But sure, I'm part of that environment so have a different view on things. If I use your definition, I'll argue that Rust is still "a pretty obscure language".

[oblio]

Rust is a pretty obscure language, when compared to Java, C#, C/C++, Javascript, Python, etc.

Rust is a lot better known because of internet fame, which didn't really exist to this magnitude until well after the dotcom crash.

My point is, Python's popularity took off in recent years, basically the last 10 years: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=python%2Cjava, primarily due to data science, machine learning, science in general.

Around until 2005 at least, it was known as a friendly scripting language with a few web frameworks which were not that popular (Django was first released in 2005), as the language that was starting to be adopted by distributions for scripting tools (the first Ubuntu version was launched in 2004 and was one of the first distros to use it extensively). It wasn't really present for development work in most cases, DevOps was the domain of bash/Perl (for older stuff) or Ruby (for newer stuff).

People tend to forget how obscure Python was before 2000, compared to the mainstream language it is today. And I say that as someone who likes Python ;-)

[gen220]

Chiming back in to say that, while everything you're saying is correct (i.e. Python was not a ubiquitous language until "relatively" recently), it doesn't change the point: the best packaging solutions, done right, need to be done early in a language's history.

To illustrate the point with an example, you could invent cargo for python yesterday or in 2005, but it wouldn't have solved the problem, because you would still have decades-worth of third-party libraries that wouldn't comply to py-cargo's packaging requirements.

In contexts like these, it's the package manager with the fewest hard-asks (i.e. pip, or npm for node) that wins.

Go, for example, endured major controversies over migrating away from GOPATH-managed-with-third-party-dep-managers to go modules. Even though `go mod` would have been the best solution to start with from scratch, inertia and breaking changes are a real thing.

[dalke]

Where is gen220 rewriting Python history?

Rust is a pretty obscure language now in pretty much the same way that Python was an obscure language then.

Of course the world of programmers was smaller in the 1990s. But if your baseline is the entire world, then probably every programming language outside of Basic, C/C++, and Pascal was obscure in the 1990s. Just like Rust is now.

It feels very much like you have shifted baselines to determine what "obscure" means.

From my view, Python's popularity took off around 2000. That's when I no longer had to tell people what Python was, and when people in my field (cheminformatics) started shifting new code development from Perl to Python. It's also about when I co-founded the Biopython project for bioinformatics. And SWIG in the mid-1990s included Python support because Python was being used to steer supercomputing calculations at LANL.

So your statement that Python's popularity and use in science in general started only in 2010 sounds like revisionism which distorts the actual history with an artificial baseline.

You wrote "with a few web frameworks which were not that popular".

Ummm.... what? Zope was quite popular. The 2001 Python conference had its own Zope track, and the 2002 conferences felt like it was 50% Zope programmers.

Quoting its Wikipedia entry, "Zope has been called a Python killer app, an application that helped put Python in the spotlight". One of the citations is from 2000, at https://web.archive.org/web/20000302033606/http://www.byte.c... , with "there's no killer app that leads people to Perl in the same way that Zope leads people to Python."