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Comment by harel | Hacker News Reader

The switch from python 2 to 3 was a breaking change, and for a good reason. This transition was necessary to bring the language to more modern times and took a long time to complete. It was a singular event and It is now mostly a non issue as most codebases are py3. In other words, not the best example.

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What about the python dependency system? Pip/requirements.txt => pipenv => Poetry

The python packaging story is a huge wart on an otherwise stellar language. I do wish poetry (or pipenv) would be blessed as the way, or they'd accept PEP-582. However, as an observer, they're trying super hard to be totally BC and it's just prolonging the pain, especially as you compare python against other interpreted languages like node or PHP.

It's a choice - use what works best for you. They all collect the packages from the same place by default.

The issue is that because there was never an early community consensus on a package management system, I come across github projects that don't declare dependencies at all, and I have to look through the code to figure out what to install. This never happens with, say, javascript projects.

And people know this is an issue in python, which is why we have Poetry now. So at least in terms of dependency management, I would say Python is less stable than Javascript

That sounds like some a case of a random repo by someone who didn't do anything for public consumption. This is not a norm and I don't think you can judge the Python ecosystem by this case just as one cannot judge the JS world from one rouge package or a package that contains a one liner. I work a lot with both python and javascript and the points you raise just don't seem applicable. Neither are more "stable" than the other. They are what they are - cons and pros and all that.

I'm not calling python less stable overall, just in terms of package management, as a counterexample to OP who was saying that python is more stable than javascript

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