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| ▲ | zahlman 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | hankbond 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | Kwpolska 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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? | | |
| ▲ | necovek an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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). | |
| ▲ | CamouflagedKiwi an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | zahlman 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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/ . |
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| ▲ | pjmlp an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | SJC_Hacker 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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, | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > “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. | |
| ▲ | Kwpolska 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | necovek an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 24 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The current standard library urllib is a refactoring of previous attempts from the 2.x standard library, and urllib.request is just a sub-package. It does not represent adoption of requests; requests builds on urllib3, which was created to fill in gaps in what the standard library provided, and named like that because the 2.x standard library had both a `urllib` and a `urllib2` as they struggled to figure it out. |
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| ▲ | petre 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. |
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