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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

It's not just the python, this is the experience practically everywhere and that's why people create containers etc. It's excruciatingly hard to setup the environment to start doing anything productive these days, you can't just start coding unless you use an IDE like Xcode or PyCharm.

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JS isn't perfect, but it's so much easier to deal with than Python in these regards.

Js libs don't need to care for things like system packages and drivers as much as Python ML does.

Ever tried running JS libs with C bindings? You're going to run into the exact same problems as you have running python code with C bindings.

CommonJS vs ES6 module loading is already a nightmare.

I've had the exact same issues with the JS ecosystem (ran into a problem where npm wouldn't work but yarn did, still haven't figured out why).

Both are easy and reliable with a few months of experience. Both are terrible if you rarely ever use them.

That's probably fair. I've found pyenv/venv/poetry/pipenv/pip/conda/etc more frustrating than ESM/CJS/yarn/npm/PNP/etc, but then I just do a lot less Python stuff than JS these days.

Not sure about that. Golang or Rust have no such problem in my experience.

Maybe the difference is the legacy and the community? Golang and Rust kind of languages are geared toward software engineers and are pretty new, meanwhile things like Python or JS or anything very popular are used as tools by people great at things that are not necessarily in the domain of software engineering but they created very useful libraries and tools regardless which usually means piles and layers of very useful code that has poor engineering.

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