[mananaysiempre]

> Heck, the package manager having to execute random code in every package (setup.py).

Nope! Not since the mid-2010s. It took a long time, but with wheels[1], install-time actions are finally separate from packaging-time actions, and the former do not include any user-defined actions at all.

Just about every sufficiently general system allows for arbitrary code in the latter, be they in debian/rules or PKGBUILD or the buildPhase argument to mkDerivation or—indeed—in setup.py. (Most systems also try to sandbox those sooner or later, although e.g. the Arch Linux maintainers gave up on cutting off Go and Rust builds from the Internet AFAIU.)

Don’t forget to `python setup.py bdist_wheel` your stuff before you upload it!

> And speaking of beautiful and elegant, dunders everywhere, really?

It’s the one reserved namespace in the language, so its usage for __init__.py and __main__.py seems—perhaps not beautiful, but fairly reasonable?

[1] https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/binary...

[oblio]

> Just about every sufficiently general system allows for arbitrary code in the latter, be they in debian/rules or PKGBUILD or the buildPhase argument to mkDerivation or—indeed—in setup.py. (Most systems also try to sandbox those sooner or later, although e.g. the Arch Linux maintainers gave up on cutting off Go and Rust builds from the Internet AFAIU.)

Most other programming language package managers don't, see Maven for Java.

But then again, NONE of the scripting languages ever wanted to learn stuff from Java, especially regarding packaging (lack of packaging namespaces is another major blunder re-created by Python and several others, including Javascript).

[mananaysiempre]

> Most other programming language package managers don't, see Maven for Java.

So it’s not able to express native extensions or even codegen then? I suppose that’s OK for something that’s not the only available solution, but I don’t think I’d love it, either.

> But then again, NONE of the scripting languages ever wanted to learn stuff from Java, especially regarding packaging[.]

Both Java and its docs are just extremely tedious to read, to be honest. I say that with all due respect to its principal designers and acknowledging my ever-hopeless crush on Self where a lot of the tech originated. (And I don’t only mean 2000s Java—it took me literal days to trawl through the Android frame pacing library to find[1] the two lines constituting the actual predictor, commented “TODO: The exponential smoothing factor here is arbitrary”. The code of the Go standard library, nice as that is, gives me a similar feeling with how... vertical it is.)

That’s not an excuse for ignorance, but it’s a centuries-old observation that you need to avoid inflicting undue pain on your readers if you want your ideas to survive. The flip side is that there may be untapped ideas in obscure or unpleasant texts written by smart people.

So if you can point to things one could learn from Java, I’d very much be interested.

(And no, literature searches are not trivial—I’ve occasionally spent months on literature searches, sometimes to realize that the thing I wanted either isn’t in the literature or is in someone’s thesis that’s only been published a year ago.)

[1] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/opt/gam...

[oblio]

Well, they didn't need to read much about Java in this case, frankly. Just creating a simple Java project with Maven would have showed the groupId concept (namespaces preventing top level squatting), for example.

https://maven.apache.org/guides/getting-started/index.html#h...

Anyway, too late now, now Python & co. are finding their own, alternative, ways to retrofit stuff like this.

[jen20]

Lack of namespacing is a trap most language package managers have fallen into sadly: even Cargo sees it as an “advantage” not to have them, apparently.

I think that is extremely short sighted, and that all packages including standard ones should be namespaced.