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 They seem to always need a very specific (often outdated) version of python, require a bunch of venv nonsense, googling gives tons of outdated info that no longer works, and generally seem incredibly not portable.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?
I’m not sure this can be really fixed with Python 3, maybe we just have to hope for Python 4
I’ve started using poetry and the experience has improved.
The reason you do stuff in a venv is to isolate that environment from other python projects on your system, so one Python project doesn’t break another. I use Docker for similar reasons for a lot of non-Python projects.
A lot of Python projects involve specific versions of libraries, because things break. I’ve had similar issues with non-Python projects. I’m not sure I’d say Python is particularly worse about it.
There are tools in place that can make the sharing of Python projects incredibly easy and portable and consistent, but I only ever see the best maintained projects using them unfortunately.
Python is hacky, because it hacks. There’s a bunch of ways you can do anything. You can run it on numerous platforms, or even on web assembly. It’s not maintained centrally. Each “app” you find is just somebodies hack project they’re sharing with you for fun.
Docker might be solution here.
But from my experience most python scripts are absolute junk. The barrier for entry is low so there’s a massive disparity in quality.
