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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

Python should just do what JavaScript does and install all dependencies to a project-local folder.

Almost nothing should do what JavaScript does, not even JavaScript. Of all the interpreted languages I’ve used, JS has the single worst ecosystem for running production code. If your experience is primarily with JS, do yourself a favor and try to grok other languages and ecosystems.

You are assuming there is a "project", but Python code with massive dependencies can (and often should) be a bare script in an arbitrary folder that runs by invoking the Python interpreter on it, without "installing" anything except missing dependencies.

That's not a bare script then, it's a project with dependencies that need to be installed. This misunderstanding is how you fuck up a developer environment.

I'm surprised this is getting downvoted. This is the only sane way to manage dependencies. They must be relative to the thing you care about.

There are tradeoffs for sure, like the ridiculous sizes of those directories on development machines. But a giant SSD is cheaper than my time resolving dependency issues on user machines.

They essentially are. Not in the actual directory but in the virtual env and not cluttering up your project directory. This is superior to JavaScript in my opinion

No language should replicate anything JavaScript does when it comes to package management

That's literally what the article is about.

It does: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0582/

Though, as the sibling comments say, it's debatable whether it should.

Not sure if JavaScript has anything that any other language or development tool should copy.

It is a mess... But you can often get a project running an awful lot quicker than in python

True, but if that's the metric we're basing our language choice off of then we should all go back to PHP.

Yeah no kidding. I prefer it as a prototyping language. Unfortunately, I work in networking, and it's become the raison d'etre for our "DevOps". At least we're not using Ansible anymore... :|

JavaScript's package management is significantly better than Pythons:

- There's one tool to use, and it comes pre-installed

- You don't have to deal with virtualenvs or packages from different projects conflicting.

- Native code dependencies "just work".

That one tool must be yarnnpmgypbabelwebpack?

Babel and Webpack aren't package management tools. I guess there is now yarn in addition to NPM. But NPM works just fine. And furthermore they interoperate.

which gets defined in Yet Another YAML Language

> You don't have to deal with virtualenvs or packages from different projects conflicting.

That's only because you're basically assured there will be conflicts inside any single project. Every time I install anything via npm I get a boatload of warnings about insecure dependencies, which are effectively impossible to fix without breaking the whole mountain of hacks.

There are good deployment stories out there. JS is not one of them.

> That's only because you're basically assured there will be conflicts inside any single project.

That's not an issue with the package management though, that's an issue with the quality of the packages themselves. The JS ecosystem does have issues there. But the tooling itself is good.

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