Python is the blub language now.

if you are working on one tiny project on your machine that pips in four packages you probably think pip was OK.

Circa 2017 I was working on systems that were complex enough that pip couldn't build them and after I got to the bottom of it I knew it not my fault but it was the fault of pip.

I built a system which could build usable environments out of pre-built wheels and sketched out the design of a system that was roughly 'uv but written in Python' but saw two problems: (1) a Python dependent system can be destroyed by people messing with Python environments, like my experience is that my poetry gets trashed every six months or so and (2) there was just no awareness by the 'one tiny project on your machine that pips in four packages' people that there was a correctness problem at all and everybody else was blaming themselves for a problem and didn't have a clear understanding of what was wrong with pip or what a correct model for managing python dependencies is (short answer: see maven) or that a 100% correct model was even possible and that we'd have to always settle for a 97% model. The politics looked intractable so I gave up.

Now written in rust, uv evaded the bootstrap problem and it dealt with the adoption problem by targeting 'speed' as people would see the value in that even if they didn't see the value in 'correctness'. My system would have been faster than pip because it would have kept a cache, but uv is faster still.

Poetry and friends are so bad that many people continued just using pip -r requirements.txt despite knowing about this other stuff

Poetry having users isn’t the metric for success. pip having way less users is.

Everything “just works” and is fast - and that’s basically it.

You can run a script with a one liner and it will automatically get you the same python and venv and everything as whoever distributed the python code, in milliseconds if the packages are already cached on your local computer.

Very easy to get going without even knowing what a venv or pypi or anything is.

If you are already an expert you get “faster simpler tooling” and if you are a complete beginner it’s “easy peasy lemon squeezy”.

It's not horrifically slow.

Maybe I could give up uv, but giving up ruff would suck.

You seem to be underestestimating the laziness of the people, and overestimating their resolve. Angry forks usually don't last, angst doesn't prevent maintenance burnouts.

Always choose the best tool for the job.

Then import that tool and and check if __name__ == "__main__"

Good luck with that. I haven't been successful at convincing anyone to move away from it. I'm so fucking sick of writing Python at work lol

i think the main problem was that people didn't believe that pip was broken, or didn't think there was any value in a 100% correct package manager over a 97% correct package manager (e.g. misread "worse is better")

I had the problem basically understood in 2018 and I am still pissed that everybody wanted to keep taking their chances with pip just like they like to gamble with agent coders today.

Now that people know a decent package manager is possible in Python I think there is going to be no problem getting people to maintain one.

that makes zero sense to me. developing something like ruff from scratch takes a lot of things happening - someone having the idea, the time to develop it from scratch in their free time, or the money to do it as a job, and perhaps the need to find collaborators if it's too large a project for one person. but now ruff is there, there's no need to build it from scratch. if I wanted to build a python linter or formatter I would simply fork ruff and build on top of it. as others have said in this subthread, that's the whole point of open source!

Cannot we at one point consider the tool to be "done"? I mean, what is there to constantly change and improve? Genuinely curious. It sounds like a tool that can be finished. Can it not be?