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by c7DJTLrn 1269 days ago
>Don't all of these use pip under the hood?

The point is that every extra tool you need to work on a project is another thing you need to get installed and working. It's another thing that will rot over time. In 5 years it might be totally unusable and broken.

When I clone a project, I want to be productive with it as quickly as possible.
1 comments
teilo 1269 days ago
Yeah, but the author is comparing it to JavaScript. How is the tooling less of a mess in JavaScript?
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c7DJTLrn 1269 days ago
I am the author. npm/yarn are pretty much the defacto package managers for JS, so that's one less nightmare to deal with. But I never really said that the tooling is better in the JS ecosystem. The better performance is just enough to tip the scales in favor of it.
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teilo 1268 days ago
And pip is the defacto package manager for Python, and it's built in, and it just works, and venv is the defacto virtual environment manager, and it's built in, and it just works. And yes, there are other abstractions built on top of pip and venv, and some of them, like Poetry, work incredibly well.

But JavaScript is in no way different in this regard: Bit, Yarn, PNPM, Turbo, NX, Rush. If anything, JS has more tooling chaos than Python. And don't get me started on webpack and all its alternatives. And then there is the repository chaos, umpteen abandoned packages, repeated instances of malware injection (which has also happened in the cheeseshop, I know, but not nearly as often).

In the end, you choose a tool, and use it until you decide there is a better tool, and you get to work. I used to use only pip and venv. For a while I used virtualenvwrapper. Now I use Poetry with asdf, and it is a very pleasant experience.

The better JavaScript performance doesn't matter in 90% of use cases. In nearly every real-world bottleneck, the answer is not to switch ecosystems, but to optimize. How much traction has JS gotten in workloads where numpy and tensorflow rule the roost?

And you don't like Python's syntax. That's your prerogative. I love it, and so do millions of other python devs.

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