Comment by moron4hire
17 hours ago
It's this sort of stuff that leaves me scratching my head why people like Python so much. I hear them say they prefer the syntax and personally I feel like that's such a small part of the holistic experience of working with any particular language. It's one of the reasons why I gave up on C++ years ago for .NET, the whole system of tooling in .NET has never left me feeling like I was pigeonholed into doing things in stupid, self-flagelating ways. Why should I use a language like C++ that doesn't provide a standard set of package management and build tools? Why should I use a language like Python that feels like it's being designed by amateurs?
I felt like the tooling in Racket, CLisp, and Java were similarly pragmatic and not either religiously devoted to some concept of "backwards compatibility" that I seriously doubt most people actually need, or "ease of use" that actually proves itself to be easy when you consider the not-happy-path of the beginner tutorials. Racket, I didn't continue just because the library ecosystem isn't mature enough to keep up with the latest in databases and other 3rd party services. Java I quit largely because of Oracle and some 2010s problems with stagnation. CLisp mostly because it was too hard to socialize. But never because I thought the core language and tooling were holding me back.
You are right the syntax is a small part of it, but it is more important than you say in this case because Python syntax is one of the things that makes it very readable.
Even if you dislike the direction Python is going in, a lot of what attracted people to Python in the first place is still there. The readability, the large standard library, the huge ecosystem. There are libraries and frameworks for everything: numerical stuff, web development, GUIs etc. Its actually a nice language in itself, just going in the wrong direction now.
If you look at it historically it was really good comparatively. If you compare it to the alternatives available 20 years ago it looks pretty good.
It's easy to start learning on, or prototype with, and then sometimes momentum just keeps it going. Also it may not really be the best at anything, but it's "pretty good" at just about everything. It's kind of like vanilla ice cream.
Packaging can be irritating although uv takes the sting out a bit.
You are right that outside of verbosity, once you get used to the syntax of a language, the value of one over the other kind of fades.
> Packaging can be irritating although uv takes the sting out a bit.
uv proves the OP’s point. Why couldn’t the core team and the core-adjacent PyPA make a tool as liked as uv, and why is the Python package manager uv written in Rust and not Python?
For the same reason GP posted and half the stdlib is written in C: Python is a language that is almost always good enough, but never really the best (and especially when it comes to performance of complex algorithms).
Because uv itself can fetch a Python distribution. If it's written in Python, it's quite a bit harder to distribute, assuming one of their goals is not to require an existing Python install.
> Why couldn’t the core team and the core-adjacent PyPA make a tool as liked as uv
Incredibly large backward-compatibility burdens [0], internal politics [1] and general institutional dysfunction (no footnote; if you're familiar then you need no explanation, and if you aren't then the less said the better). Nothing to do with Python as a language. Most of the important pieces to get uv-like performance are algorithmic choices, and most of the rest are available as built-in C code in the reference implementation [2].
(Edit: wait, I recognize your username. You should definitely know these sorts of things.)
> why is the Python package manager uv written in Rust and not Python?
Because that's the language that Astral devs like, and because installing Python itself is considered in scope for uv so there would be an intractable bootstrapping issue.
[0]: In particular, the entire model of `setup.py` defining metadata is certifiably insane, especially when you consider the projects that expect to feed that code to Setuptools at build time in order to figure out what version of Setuptools is needed at build time. But this legacy approach is seen as something that absolutely must be guaranteed to work for well beyond even now; even attempts to remove long-deprecated, minor aspects of that functionality end up breaking major projects, including ones that didn't even require a build step in the first place [3].
[1]: Most obviously, GvR not wanting to have anything to do with it when initially approached by the SciPy people in IIRC 2011, leading to the creation of Conda). But a lot of other things, too. The backwards-compatibility issues synergize with this; consider for example the architectural dumpster fire of Setuptools, and the timeline of distutils removal from the standard library.
[2]: See e.g. my analysis in https://zahlman.github.io/posts/oxidation/ .
[3]: See e.g. my LWN article https://lwn.net/Articles/1020576/ .
2 replies →
C++ has vcpkg, conan, cmake and ninja nowadays.
They are as standard as arguing about Ant, Maven, Gradle in Java, npm, pnpm, yarn in node, and so on.
However I fully agree with the gist of your comment, basically Python is the new BASIC.
However at least BASIC was compiled, with exception of the 8 bit home micros.
> Racket, CLisp
Syntax really does matter more than you give it credit for. Were that not the case, I'd expect one Lisp or Scheme dialect or other to take Python's place. Outside of that counterfactual, Python's competition was stuff like Ruby, and it turned out that network effects were also pretty important.
> It's this sort of stuff that leaves me scratching my head why people like Python so much
Because of the libraries, not necessarily the language, which is also quite straightforward. For example we found a niche library that speaks the ISO-TP protocol in Python, which allows us to communicate with vehicle ECUs. That's why people also use C++, even tough I quite doubt it's because they like the language. Add to that that it's also heavily used in embedded programming. Yes, you could call a C/C++ library from another language, depending how well the language can do that.
I prefer Ruby, but Python probably has just about everything one would need. It's also great for data processing. We hardly have anything better than pandas, polars, numpy, scipy in other languages and that:s without even mentioning ML tooling.
Python is mostly about the “batteries included” standard library and what’s becoming nearly standard third party libs, being able to play around in the REPL,
The standard library is full of dead batteries. If the stdlib is so good, why does everyone install requests instead of using the stdlib http client? And why requests or something like it hasn't been adopted into stdlib after so many years of stability?
Parts of requests has been adopted into stdlib: https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.request.html
People mostly defer to requests because they do not track language development closely and because we are creatures of habit.
I try to avoid non-stdlib packages when stdlib will do a good job, but I received negative feedback from people who aren't aware of the updates and couldn't foresee supply-chain attacks.
2 replies →
You are picking one of the weak points of the standard library and an unusually popular replacement (and AFAIK it is built on the standard library). I cannot think of many others that are widely used. Maybe lxml ?
A Python codebase might well use requests, but it will almost always also heavily use the standard library.
Because the typical Python programmer does not appreciate the advantages of a slightly rusty stdlib compared to reaching for the bedlam that is PyPI.
> “batteries included” standard library and what’s becoming nearly standard third party libs
Historically, the standard library made sense. And we're talking about a history that stretches back to before Internet connections were ubiquitous, to say nothing of connection speed.
Now the standard library is full of things that they refuse to remove because it would supposedly be too disruptive, but which they would never think of adding today if they weren't already there.