Comment by lmm
4 days ago
> The success of python is due to not needing a broader ecosystem for A LOT of things.
I honestly think that was a coincidence. Perl and Ruby had other disadvantages, Python won despite having bad package management and a bloated standard library, not because of it.
The bloated standard library is the only reason I kept using python in spite of the packaging nightmare. I can do most things with no dependencies, or with one dependency I need over and over like matplotlib
If python had been lean and needed packages to do anything useful, while still having a packaging nightmare, it would have been unusable
Well, sure, but equally I think there would have been a lot more effort to fix the packaging nightmare if it had been more urgent.
There was a massive effort though, the proliferation of several different package managers is evidence of that.
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The bloated standard library is the reason why you can send around a single .py file to others and they can execute it instantly.
Most of the python users are not able nor aware of venv, uv, pip and all of that.
It's because Ruby captured the web market and Python everything else, and I get everything is more timeless than a single segment.
Ruby was competing on the web market and lost to many others, including Python. In part, because python had a much broader ecosystem, and php had wide adoption through wordpress and others, and javascript was expanding from browsers.