Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by anonymous-panda 835 days ago
Packaging and stability reasons. Same for why it’s a 1.7gb install - probably where they landed after having tons of support issues on some random Python version they didn’t test or some issue with a dependency that had that issue. Freezing the entire set of artifacts is more stable and Python lets you move pretty quick. I can’t speak to why nodejs vs Python though - maybe Python is easier to embed?
3 comments
twelfthnight 835 days ago
Yeah, I imagine that was the decision calculus. "Instead of spending some more effort to save millions of unnecessary downloads of python's runtime using a different language, let's just bundle Python!"

I wouldn't be surprised if it was version 2.7 too...

link
pests 835 days ago
What? They only get package and stability because they include the runtime. If they just went with a compiled language they could distribute native binaries and have actual packaging and stability.
link
anonymous-panda 835 days ago
Yes, but it’s not just a single metric. Another is how easy it is for them to hire productive members of the team and how much that costs them - middling Python developers churning out fine”ish” code are cheaper than Rust developers doing the same. It’s hard to find a language where you can be as productive as a developer in Python that also has AOT compilation to generate standalone binaries.

Tldr: there’s multiple factors to consider here and it’s more interesting to understand the pressures that cause the decisions, especially if you want to try to create a world where different decisions are made.

link
jen20 834 days ago
> It’s hard to find a language where you can be as productive as a developer in Python that also has AOT compilation to generate standalone binaries.

Outside specific cases around machine learning, it’s really not: Go is that language. It’s not like each of those platforms doesn’t have to have a similar team that understand Go anyway (for their SDK), so they could save their customers the abject pain of Python dependency management by just writing their CLIs using it.

link
jen20 835 days ago
Of course, writing them in Go would solve all of these problems while producing packages which are much smaller.
link