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Is Python's tooling incredibly difficult, or am I just stupid? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 2 weeks ago by zaphodb2002@sh.itjust.works to c/programming@programming.dev

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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 They seem to always need a very specific (often outdated) version of python, require a bunch of venv nonsense, googling gives tons of outdated info that no longer works, and generally seem incredibly not portable.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?

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[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev -3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Difficult? How so? I find compiling C and C++ stuff much more difficult than anything python. It never works on the first try whereas with python the chances are much much higher.

What's is so difficult to understand about virtual envs? You have global python packages, you can also have per user python packages, and you can create virtual environments to install packages into. Why do people struggle to understand this?

The global packages are found thanks to default locations, which can be overridden with environment variables. Virtual environments set those environment variables to be able to point to different locations.

python -m venv .venv/ means python will execute the module venv and tell it to create a virtual environment in the .venv folder in the current directory. As mentioned above, the environment variables have to be set to actually use it. That's when source .venv/bin/activate comes into play (there are other scripts for zsh and fish). Now you can run pip install $package and then run the package's command if it has one.

It's that simple. If you want to, you can make it difficult by doing sudo pip install $package and fucking up your global packages by possibly updating a dependency of another package - just like the equivalent of updating glibc from 1.2 to 1.3 and breaking every application depending on 1.2 because glibc doesn't fucking follow goddamn semver.

As for old versions of python, bro give me a break. There's pyenv for that if whatever old ass package you're installing depends on an ancient 10 year old python version. You really think building a C++ package from 10 years ago will work more smoothly than python? Have fun tracking down all the unlocked dependency versions that "Worked On My Machine 🏧" at the start of the century.

The only python packages I have installing are those with C/C++ dependencies which have to be compiled at install time.

Y'all have got to be meme'ing.

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[–] tyler@programming.dev 0 points 2 weeks ago

I think you have got to be meme'ing. You literally wrote 7 paragraphs about how to build something for python when for other languages it's literally a single command. For Ruby, it's literally bundle. Nothing else. Doesn't matter if it's got C packages or not. Doesn't matter if it's windows or not. Doesn't matter if you have a different project one folder over that uses an older gem or not. Doesn't matter if it's 15 years old or not. One command.

Just for comparison for gradle it's ./gradlew build For maven is mvn install For Elixir it's mix deps.get mix compile For node it's npm install

every other language it's hardly more than 1 command.

Python is the only language that thinks that it's even slightly acceptable to have virtual environments when it was universally decided upon decades ago to be a tremendously bad idea. Just like node_modules which also was known to be a bad idea before npm decided to try it out again, only for it to be proven to be a bad idea right off the bat. And all the other python build tools have agreed that virtual envs are bad.