Programming

17528 readers

254 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

202

Is Python's tooling incredibly difficult, or am I just stupid? (self.programming)

submitted 3 weeks ago by zaphodb2002 to c/[email protected]

115 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So I'm no expert, but I have been a hobbyist C and Rust dev for a while now, and I've installed tons of programs from GitHub and whatnot that required manual compilation or other hoops to jump through, but I am constantly befuddled installing python apps. They seem to always need a very specific (often outdated) version of python, require a bunch of venv nonsense, googling gives tons of outdated info that no longer works, and generally seem incredibly not portable. As someone who doesn't work in python, it seems more obtuse than any other language's ecosystem. Why is it like this?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

No, it's not just you, Python's tooling is a mess. It's not necessarily anyone's fault, but there are a ton of options and a lot of very similarly named things that accomplish different (but sometimes similar) tasks. (pyenv, venv, and virtualenv come to mind.) As someone who considers themselves between beginner and intermediate proficiency in Python, this is my biggest hurdle right now.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Python’s tooling is a mess.

Not only that. It's a historic mess. Over the years, growing a better and better toolset left a lot of projects in a very messy state. So many answers on Stack Overflow that mention easy_install - I still don't know what it is, but I guess it was some kind of proto uv.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

Every time I'm doing anything with Python I ask myself if Java's tooling is this complicated or I'm just used to it by now. I think a big part of the weirdness is that a lot of Python tooling is tied to the Python installation whereas in Java things like Maven and Gradle are separate. In addition, I think dependencies you install get tied to that Python installation, while in Java they just are in a cache for Maven/Gradle. And in the horrible scenario where you need to use different versions of Maven/Gradle (one place I was at specifically needed Maven 3.0.3 for one project and a different for a different, don't ask, it's dumb and their own fault for setting it up that way) at least they still have one common cache for everything.

I guess it also helps that with Java you (often) don't need platform specific jar files. But Python is often used as an easy and dynamic scripting interface over more performant, native code. So you don't really run into things like "this artifact doesn't have a 64 bit arm version for python 2" often with Java. But that's not a fault of Python's tooling, it's just the reality of how it's used.