Comment by procaryote
3 days ago
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.
Maybe. A lot of them felt like one-person projects that not many people cared about. I think that on the contrary, part of the reason so many different package managers could coexist with no clear winner emerging was that the problem wasn't very serious for a lot of the community.