Comment by notatallshaw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notatallshaw | Hacker News Reader

There are a couple of promising tools written in Rust looking to replace Pip for most users.

Rip (https://github.com/prefix-dev/rip/issues) which is more of a library for other rust tools to be on top of like Pixi (which is looking to replace both Pip and Conda).

And now uv, which seems to be looking to replace Pip, Pip-Tools, and eventually Poetry and PDM.

A lot of the explosion in tools in the Python world is coming from the desire for better workflows. But it has been enabled by the fact that build configuration and calling has been standardized and tool makers are able to follow standards instead of reverse engineering easy install or setup tools.

I know a lot of people are put off by there being so many tools, but I think in a few years the dust will settle and there will emerge a best practice work flow that most users can follow.

As a primarily Python developer and someone who occasionally contributes to Pip to solve complex dependency resolution issues it does make me wonder if I should hang my hat on that and learn enough rust to contribute to one of these projects eventually.

My experience with Rust developers who dwell in Python land is that they fundamentally disagree with most of the language that is Python and think they know better than incumbents what belongs and what doesn't.

To be fair, python package management is in such a poor state that I would expect any outside opinion to not be worse.

The Rust ecosystem gets so much right that honestly, even as a career-long Python developer myself (and Rust for many years, but that's less of my point), they honestly probably do know how to build a good devxp better than much of the Python ecosystem.

Put other ways: the Python ecosystem has had 30+ years to figure out how to make packaging not suck. It has continually failed - failed less and less over time, sure, but the story is still generally speaking a nightmare ("throw it all in an OCI container" is an extremely reasonable solution to Python packaging, still, in 2024). I welcome advances, especially those inspired by tooling from languages that focused heavily on developer experience.

Tbf, being able to start from scratch makes it much easier to get those things right.

Being compatible with the mess that exists is where the difficulty comes from.

I have written a couple million lines of python professionally. Some of that is still in prod.

The last 5 or so years I've mostly done work in rust... so I guess I'm a rust developer now.

Do the last 5 years invalidate my opinions, thoughts, or skills w.r.t. python somehow?

I'm surprised anyone who has gone from python to rust still finds contributing back to the python ecosystem worthwhile.

There's a lot of important work that happens in python. Most of it isn't being done by software engineers. I think the idea of improving things for that group is plenty meaningful.

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