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by thinker5555 1672 days ago
As a "self taught and still learning developer-lite", I love the python language, but the ecosystem drives me nuts. I feel a lot of the pain expressed in the article, and it pretty much speaks to my current conclusion of "I'm trying to do things the 'right way' but there doesn't seem to be a 'right way'".

I've seen a few comments here about how Nix/NixOS fixes the whole python binary/library mess, but I'm having trouble understanding how. Does anyone have any insight to share about that?

Additionally, the whole thing kind of makes me want to move away from python wholesale. I was wondering if there are other languages that are great general languages like python that don't suffer from this whole packaging and versioning mess. Ruby? Go? Something else? I'm looking for something high level, somewhat easy to learn, and with good library support for things like working with databases and tabular data. Though I don't know much about them, I just feel like I don't want something like Java or C++ or anything like that. I want to "get things done" and not have to worry about tons of boilerplate or working at really low nitty gritty levels.
2 comments
toyg 1672 days ago
> I've seen a few comments here about how Nix/NixOS fixes the whole python binary/library mess

Nix is a bit of a cult. Its theoretical aims are laudable, but in order to get there it forces you to do a lot of work and reason strictly in its own way. Whether all this work is worth the rewards, I think is open for debate.

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lvass 1672 days ago
Chemistry is a bit of a cult. Its theoretical aims are laudable, but in order to get there it forces you to do a lot of work and reason strictly in its own way. Whether all this work is worth the rewards, I think is open for debate.
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toyg 1672 days ago
Except there the laws of nature are either true or false, whereas the ways you can package software are... a bit more than two.
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hocuspocus 1672 days ago
Scala has its own issues, but it's worth a try.

It's easy to learn coming from Python, even more so if you can start with Scala 3 right away. You cannot really get more high-level than that. There are good libraries to work with databases, Quill comes to mind if you want something user-friendly. And you can always fall back to the many Java libraries in the big data ecosystem (even though you should probably avoid it if you can).

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