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Comment by jtdev | Hacker News Reader

Or, you know, Python, Ruby, Java, Go, C#, Swift, Kotlin, etc., etc., or any number of other languages that are less of a foot-gun full of bizarre issues, poorly maintained packages, and droves of Jr. devs eager to do clever things that make the language and ecosystem psychotic.

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Python is good at many things, but packaging is not one of them. The best python package manager at the moment is Poetry, and it drew most of its inspiration from npm and yarn...

Python packaging has historically been so bad that dotcloud invented docker in an attempt to make it usable.

But at least I can just download a .py file (or a bunch of files) and just import them. Perhaps the biggest frustration/pain point in this article isn't npm as such, but that you can't "just" use some JS module.

You definitely can. On the server side, you can literally do that. On the client side, you can "import" one with a script tag, and increasingly you can use modules in browsers too.

Nothing would stop you from doing that (import thing from ‘./downloaded.js’) but it’s Just Not Done That Way and packages aren’t really built with that in mind, so it probably wouldn’t work very well in practice.

> But at least I can just download a .py file (or a bunch of files) and just import them

Unless you have a Python version locally that doesn't support some features used in said .py file...

> But at least I can just download a .py file (or a bunch of files) and just import them.

Just importing doesn't seem to work for millions of people:

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4383571/importing-files-... (1.5m views)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14132789/relative-import... (215k views)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72852/how-to-do-relative... (325k views)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1918539/can-anyone-expla... (100k views)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1260792/import-a-file-fr... (480k views)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7505988/importing-from-a... (136k views)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9252543/importerror-cann... (700k views)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2325923/how-to-fix-impor... (430k views)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15514593/importerror-no-... (250k views)

Woah woah woah, show me a Java project repo that we’re all going to be able to install here without running into an issue.

I ran into one with Go imports just the other day, and since I’m new to it, it wasn’t a 10 minute google fix.

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