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Comment by chaxor | Hacker News Reader

Packaging and Nvidia are pretty much the main reasons python has degraded in status for the past 7 years. It started with the added and unnecessary confusion from conda (and silly things like pythonxy), but has really escalated through extra stupidities like poetry. Much of the features that may be enticing for these extra packages should have pushed the developers to improve the standard tools in python (pip). The other problem is due to python's lead in ML and the need to work with GPUs. That started with tensorflow, which had immense (still does) issues in dealing with versioning, mostly due to Nvidia (matching cuda versions and such). So effectively, Nvidia and package management killed a good language.

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Poetry certainly made our life much easier and was a productivity improvement. It the the tool that brought us back from Conda because it was able to solve environments than nothing in Pip land was able to do.

Was that before or after pip's new resolver was released at the end of 2020?

Before!

Poetry seems pretty slow due to some of the extra dependency logic it builds on top of pip. Whether this trade off is worth it probably depends on the scope of the project. For most of my projects I stick with pip and almost never run into issues.

It's unlikely Python would still be a popular language without Conda. As the article says, many Python users are not traditional software engineers - they need a tool that just works and Conda is the closest thing in the ecosystem.

Used to spend much time to optimize Gentoo Linux but eventually switched to Ubuntu to be productive. I feel Conda is similarly useful, especially if not considering Docker i.e. local dev, and am disappointed hackers seem to be dismissing it.

The problem is that poetry/conda/etc chose to make their own thing to begin with, when they should've just improved the standard language tool with the features they wanted. That's one key difference between shit languages (such as R) and languages that have good tooling (e.g. Rust) - the community works on the core together more rather than each person doing their own thing and confusing everyone in the community by not having a standard way to do anything. Every package management developer for python should have just added features to the standard package manager instead of doing their own thing.

Python's demise would be it's undeserving fate to be the world's best "glue" language.

The language needs to stand on it's own to be competitive in the long run.

Pure Python modules are much easier to install and keep updated.

It will be a VERY deserving fate, since the community is always busy fighting amongst themselves and the maintainers are conservative to the point of being unreasonable.

Maybe such a community deserves obscurity.

Python has real problems that need addressing, and that was true 10 years ago as well, packaging included. Pretending this isn't the case makes more serious techies just laugh at Python, and it's fully deserved.

We do tech, for God's sake. We don't do religion. Merit is what should call the shots.

I have seen recent predictions that put Python as the main AI language in 2030 with 90% confidence. It's not dead or going away.

Python also works better in Codex and chatGPT, as an output of AI. Almost all AI research comes in Python, most of it never gets reimplemented, and the cutting edge stuff are usually just in Python. So if you want to try the latest toys - you guessed it - you need Python. Or be prepared to wait for 6-12 months/forever to get ported to your lang, and be prepared for bugs and less support

AI is going to be a differentiator for programming languages. The languages with more code out there, more questions answered on SO, will work better, causing more adoption, it's the rich get richer problem.

I believe you're misrepresenting what I said.

I got no horse in the race and I don't care if Python is "going away". It likely will not since it has a huge inertia and devoted fans.

Furthermore, you citing the current state of affairs is not convincing. You're basically saying "the sun is shining now at noon, surely it will keep shining during midnight". Or "right now it's raining so surely it'll keep raining 24/7 for the next year".

Also who predicts stuff for 2030 with 90% confidence? I'd like to have that person's self-esteem because nobody can predict as far into the future.

I've been part of a number of communities and Python's seems dysfunctional and anarchic.

Maybe that's a good thing and breeds creative forces -- the proponents certainly make that case, I heard, and I'm not opposed to the idea, just a tad skeptical. Time will tell, right?

In the meantime, Python is still missing some stability guarantees and a good package manager. As a programmer that's a turnoff, so I work with other languages. Make of that what you will but I'll restate that I got no horse in the race. I'm using my experience to judge if something seems a good fit to work with, and maybe -- does it have a future.

Also a good language for non-professional programmers. When people ask me which language they should learn as a first language, I recommend Python. Not because it's a great language; but because it has a massive ecosystem that allows beginners to build fun things with minimal effort.

The greatest strength of Python, I think, is that it allows cross-disciplinary collaboration, because it's easy for non-programmers to learn.

Which makes the lack of a functional easy-to-use package manager all the more frustrating.

You're not wrong but it's a double-edged sword: people's first language leaves a deep impression and people often can't un-write (from their brains) the wrong programming practices they learned from Python.

I've seen people openly admit they'd learn their second language much faster if they didn't try to constantly compare it with Python.

As usual, hindsight is 20/20, and nobody is telling you these things beforehand. And those who are lucky enough to have wisdom shared with them are usually quick to dismiss it and not listen to it.

But isn’t this true no matter the first- and second-language combo? I started out writing C and this definitely influenced how I learned and wrote python code. My colleagues that started out with ruby, or java, also program in distinct ways that show their “accent”, so to say.

You are saying "this is not true" while agreeing with me -- confusing. :)

Python packaging and versioning has been a shitshow for far more than 7 years. The language has existed since the early 1990s and the philosophy about backwards compatibility and packaging hasn't changed.

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