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Comment by busfahrer | Hacker News Reader

> 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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