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Comment by fearface | Hacker News Reader

I've always seen it like this: Not everyone builds reproducible software with Python (or in general) and how you handle dependencies can vary. Python leaves it open how you do it: globally installed packages, local packages, or a mix of both.

In the end, it needs to find the import in the PYTHONPATH, so there's no magic involved, and there are multiple robust options to choose from.

So instead of bashing Python for not shoveling down an opinion on you, it's up to the developers to choose which tools they want to use.

If they don't choose one and are unable to freeze their dependencies, it's not a Python problem, but IMO lack of skill and seniority.

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You can have both: provide a sane default for most users and allow people to roll their own.

The reason why Python gets extra criticism for this is because it likes to tell people that there should be one obvious way to do it and that it comes with batteries included yet it's dependency management system is just crap and doesn't follow that at all.

> Python leaves it open how you do it

Are you saying “There’s more than one way to do it”?

Yes :-) It's fair to say Python's approach to dependency management doesn't follow the Zen of Python, but there's a simple way documented in the tutorial: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/venv.html

The fact that there's more than one way to do things in Python is why i've found it so easy and flexible, I have no idea why that goober put this motto in the zen

It's general design guideline and I like Zen of python PEP-20. Explicit is better than implicit and most packaging system in python are explicit which I like. Been using it for over 15 years after perl and been happy with it.

Nothing to complaint as every language has their own set of good and bad. This is what makes it interesting, there is always a room to improve and make things better.

I think they could learn a lot from Rust, which has a very usable, clearly defined way of listing and making dependencies. You can decide how you want to handle individual dependencies (version number, version range, git commit hash, wildcard, etc). I'm not sure how binary dependencies work (i.e. something from your system's package manager), but I've used projects that use them, so the problem is solvable.

Python has always stood out for me as a particularly odd way of doing it. It feels a bit like more like C, but with a package manager that's not quite as nice as other scripting languages have.

It's from the days when Perl was Python's main rival (the late 90s / early 00s). Perl has complex syntax and the"there's more than one way to do it" motto. Syntactically, and especially in early Python, there were fewer ways of doing things than in Perl and Python people saw that as a positive.

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