[MoonWalk]

I don't know. Isn't Python still viewed as a mess now? I was thinking of taking the time to learn it as the best way to write cross-platform utilities, but encountered a lot of negative sentiment about its ecosystem. And all the environment managers you seem to need for it are a turn-off.

Granted, this is coming from a relative noob who read and followed a couple of "how to set up Python properly" articles and that's about it. But I pretty much decided to spend my time on JavaScript, despite its cumbersomeness for implementing simple utilities.

[kstrauser]

It's vastly improved now. With uv, many times you can download a new utility off GitHub and run it with `uv run foo.py`, including fetching its dependencies.

[MoonWalk]

Cool, thanks!

[rasz]

>Isn't Python still viewed as a mess now?

Imo the coding part is fine. I have no mayor complains about it. I even like indentation as syntax as long as you use tabs :)

Python is the modern day BASIC. Slow interpreted lingua franca. As long as you are ok with its speed I say go for it. Python is the only scripting language where I maintain constant lingering awareness that every single line of code adds milliseconds to run time. As bad as instantiating new variable costing single digit ms on a GHz CPU. This quickly adds up the more you are trying to achieve.

Example benchmark, Python 3.4:

    # Direct Access d['key']: 3.3710 seconds
    # Direct Enum Access d[enum.key]: 157.9954 seconds

In latest versions Enums got "fixed" to "only" 3-6x slower than strings! SimpleNamespace to the rescue.

[graemep]

Its much exaggerated.

Its got a big standard library so you can do a lot by just installing Python. On a lot of *nix systems it will all be installed already. For simple use cases you do not have to have the environment manager.

I have had few problems with virtualenv in any case.

Where you are most likely to have problems is cross platform deployment. If you are going to package it as an exe for Windows users, and package it for major Linux distros, and whatever you need to do for MacOS etc. its going to be a pain. In that case there are multiple languages that might suit you better than JS.

[jujube3]

Python is great for data science. Anything where you need to wrap a C library like BLAS, tensorflow, PyTorch, matplotlib, numpy.

It's hot garbage for writing simple cross-platform utilities because of the need for an elaborate environment setup, painful dependency management, and constant compatibility breaks.