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by koito17 1174 days ago
>Today, there is a Python package for everything.

The same could be said about CPAN and NPM. Yet Perl is basically dead and JavaScript isn't used for any machine learning tasks as far as I'm aware. WebAssembly did help bring a niche array of audio and video codecs to the ecosystem[1][2], something I'm yet to see from Python.

I don't use Python, but with what little exposure I've had to it at work, its overall sluggish performance and need to set up a dozen virtualenvs -- only to dockerize everything in cursed ways when deploying -- makes me wonder how or why people bother with it at all beyond some 5-line script. Then again, Perl used to be THE glue language in the past and mod_perl was as big as FastAPI, and Perl users would also point out how CPAN was unparalleled in breadth and depth. I wonder if Python will follow a similar fate as Perl. One can hope :-)

[1] https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg

[2] https://github.com/brion/ogv.js/

3 comments

That’s a lot of opinions for so little exposure. There are a lot uses that don’t involve docker or a dozen virtual envs.
Honestly, I use python everyday in the ML/AI space. If we're talking in that context they're pretty spot on about python, virtualenvs, and docker.
I've used Python quite a lot and their experience sounds about right.
To counter these anecdotes, I used python for building web apis and only needed poetry to manage 1 virtual env, and containerizing with docker was straight forward.
> JavaScript isn't used for any machine learning tasks as far as I'm aware

https://github.com/facebookresearch/shumai

> WebAssembly did help bring a niche array of audio and video codecs to the ecosystem

Python already has all those: the ctypes module is just as hard to use as WebAssembly, with a much lower barrier-to-entry.

WebAssembly has the benefit of portability, though. Python on Windows... is still an open problem. Or even Python on dev-oriented distro vs. numsci-oriented distro.