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Comment by IshKebab

9 hours ago

This is one of Deno's killer use cases IMO. 100x better than shell scripting and like 5x better than Python scripting. Python should be good for this sort of thing, but it isn't.

Historically we had to use pip which was super janky. Uv solves most of pip's issues but you still do have to deal with venvs and one issue it doesn't solve is that you can't do imports by relative file path which is something you always end up wanting for ad-hoc scripting. You can use relative package paths but that's totally different.

7 comments

IshKebab

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PurpleRamen  7 hours ago

> you can't do imports by relative file path

Just add the targeted path to sys.path, or write your own importhandler. importlib might help there. But true, out of the box, imports in python3 are a bit wacky for more flexible usage.

wiseowise  8 hours ago

> 5x better than Python scripting

I’m not sure about that. All those ‘await’s, parentheses really kill my mojo. Why do you find it better than Python?

  • IshKebab  8 hours ago

    > Why do you find it better than Python?

    I said already - the main reason is you can import files by relative file path.

    You can get close to the Deno UX with uv and a script like this:

      #!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script
  #
  # /// script
  # requires-python = ">=3.12"
  # dependencies = ["httpx"]
  # ///
  import httpx
  print(httpx.get("https://example.com"))

    But you still have to deal with the venv e.g. for IDE support, linting and so on. It's just more janky than Deno.

    I wish someone would make a nice modern scripting language with arbitrary precision integers, static types, file path imports, third party dependencies in single files, etc. Deno is the closest thing I've found but in spite of how good Typescript is there are still a ton of Javascript warts you can't get away from (`var`, `==`, the number format, the prototype system, janky map/reduce design, etc.)

    • fainpul  6 hours ago

      PowerShell is pretty good for shell scripting.

        iwr https://example.com

      You also have arbitrary precision integers and all the other stuff from .NET

        $b = [BigInt]::Parse('10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000')

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