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npalli 11 hours ago

Python is nothing without it’s batteries.

jskherman 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Python is its batteries.

pphysch 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The design and success of e.g. Golang is pretty strong support for the idea that you can't and shouldn't separate a language from its broader ecosystem of tooling and packages.

LtWorf 10 hours ago | parent [-]

The success of python is due to not needing a broader ecosystem for A LOT of things.

They are of course now abandoning this idea.

lmm 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> The success of python is due to not needing a broader ecosystem for A LOT of things.

I honestly think that was a coincidence. Perl and Ruby had other disadvantages, Python won despite having bad package management and a bloated standard library, not because of it.

procaryote 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

lmm an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

LtWorf 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The bloated standard library is the reason why you can send around a single .py file to others and they can execute it instantly.

Most of the python users are not able nor aware of venv, uv, pip and all of that.

rjzzleep 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's because Ruby captured the web market and Python everything else, and I get everything is more timeless than a single segment.

1vuio0pswjnm7 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What language is used to write the batteries

logicprog 10 hours ago | parent [-]

C/C++, in large part

JPKab 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

These days it's a whole lot of Rust.

volemo 4 hours ago | parent [-]

These days it’s still a whole lot of Fortran, with some Rust sprinkled on top. (:

pjmlp 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

Which since Fortran 2003, or even Fortran 95, has gotten rather nice to use.

saboot 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And below that, FORTRAN :)

throwaway2037 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I hear this so much from Python people -- almost like they are paid by the word to say it. Is it different from Perl, Ruby, Java, or C# (DotNet)? Not in my experience, except people from those communities don't repeat that phrase so much.

The irony here: We are talking about data science. 98% of "data science" Python projects start by creating a virtual env and adding Pandas and NumPy which have numerous (really: squillions of) dependencies outside the foundation library.

m55au 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Someone correct me if I'm completely wrong, but by default (i.e. precompiled wheels) numpy has 0 dependencies and pandas has 5, one of which is numpy. So not really "squillions" of dependencies.

pandas==2.3.3

├── numpy [required: >=1.22.4, installed: 2.2.6]

├── python-dateutil [required: >=2.8.2, installed: 2.9.0.post0]

│ └── six [required: >=1.5, installed: 1.17.0]

├── pytz [required: >=2020.1, installed: 2025.2]

└── tzdata [required: >=2022.7, installed: 2025.2]

noitpmeder 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't know about _squillions_, but numpy definitely has _requirements_, even if they're not represented as such in the python graph.

e.g.

  https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/main/.gitmodules (some source code requirements)
  https://github.com/numpy/numpy/tree/main/requirements (mostly build/ci/... requirements)
  ...
m55au 3 hours ago | parent [-]

They're not represented, because those are build-time dependencies. Most users when they do pip install numpy or equivalent, just get the precompiled binaries and none of those get installed. And even if you compile it yourself, you still don't need those for running numpy.