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Python as a language I find pretty nice. What I don't find is their environment and packaging system compared to something like Rust.

"There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.", unless it is how to setup your environment.

I only use Python every few months, and it is always a struggle.

In comparison, "cargo build" works 98% of the time just after "git checkout"

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Yes, but Python really is in a tough spot when it comes to dependencies because a lot of it are compiled in a lot of different languages using libraries that may or may not be available on your OS. That's the real issue. If you install python packages honestly anything works, it's when you have the ML stack of PyTorch (needs cuda, cudnn, needs to be compiled to match your OS version) + custom CUDA operators (also need to be compiled) with something like a mariadb connection (needs the mariadb OS library).

conda solves it by packaging EVERYTHING, giving you atrocious 30GB environments, pip doesn't solve it at all and none of the challengers really have much to offer (in my opinion).

That's Anaconda that packages everything, not conda itself. No one should really use Anaconda imo, instead use Miniconda which only installs the bare minimum needed for conda to work in a base environment, and then you create environments for each project.

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