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by TheAceOfHearts 541 days ago
The problem is that Python refuses to take responsibility for the whole ecosystem. One of the biggest success stories in programming language development has been Rust's realization that all of it matters: language, version management, package management, and build tools. To have a truly outstanding experience you need to take responsibility for the whole ecosystem. Python and many other older languages just focus on one part of the ecosystem, while letting others take care of different parts.

If Python leadership had true visionaries they would sit down, analyze every publicly available Python project and build a single set of tools that could gradually and seamlessly replace the existing clusterfuck.

Python developers will pretend the language is all about simplicity and then hand you over to the most deranged ecosystem imaginable. It sure is easy to pretend that you have a really simple ecosystem when you cover your eyes and focus on a small segment of the overall experience.
2 comments
mook 541 days ago
You can kind of see this in golang. Originally it came with stuff to download dependencies, but it had major issues with more complex projects and some community-made tools became popular instead. But it meant that multiple tools were used in different places and it was kind of a mess. Later on a new system was done in the default toolchain and even though it has problems it's good enough that it's now surprising for somebody to use non-default tools.
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skeledrew 541 days ago
Who will pay for all this responsibility?
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TheAceOfHearts 541 days ago
I don't know, but are we going to pretend that it would be particularly difficult to get funding for drastically simplifying and improving the tooling for one of the world's most popular programming languages?

I'm not sure how Rust is doing it, but the problem is hardly insurmountable.

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skeledrew 540 days ago
The PSF does have massive financial challenges. I don't know how Rust does it either, but I think there's far less general overhead due to its specificity. Python has a far broader reach, with a lot of diverse use cases to cater to.
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awestroke 541 days ago
Yeah, who will pay for this drastic reduction in wasted time?
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