Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Bit of a Chesterton's fence situation. One of the reasons that Python is popular at all is because the dependency management is terrible and easy to get wrong. The point is it enables relative novices to get started without engaging with important questions. Things like what environmental assumptions are being made, what dependency versions are supported, what a sustainable build pipeline looks like. They can just be vague and their project will work in the here and now - enough to do whatever they want to do.

There is a trade off here and the equilibrium is probably deliberate. The sort of person who tries to get dependencies right up is a professional programmer and although a lot of them use Python the language is designed for a much broader audience. Java is an example of much better dependency management by default and in the main it is only professionals with a view to the long term using Java. Setting up a Java project needs a tutorial and ideally specialist software.

Can you elaborate on the difficulties of setting up Java projects? I have never worked in Java at an enterprise level, but have tinkered a bit. IntelliJ makes setting up a maven-based project pretty much one-click. But I’m guessing that the complexity that you’re referring to wouldn’t be apparent to someone like me who is only using it for small hobby projects.

You have to have identified that you need IntelliJ and know what a maven-based project is (indeed, know what a 'project' is, the concept is a bit technical). And there is the split between the JDK & JVM. This is all to be learned before actually approaching the challenge of adding a dependency to the project.

Compare that to a Python beginner where they install Python & use the text editor that exists on their machine & it can be a general purpose text editor rather than something specifically developed to write Java code. There might be one `pip install` along the way, but no requirement to understand a folder layout, project concept or even create a file for dependency management. There is even a reasonable chance that Python is pre-installed on their machine.

I don't think the OP's complaint was that python's dependency management wasn't complicated enough or doesn't involve enough cryptic XML yet. The point was that the novice will find themselves massively frustrated the moment they try to run their script on a different computer.

Indeed, the novice shouldn't have to make all kinds of intricate choices about the build system to get something running. The language designers should have provided a good set of default choices here. The problem with python is that the default choices aren't actually the good ones.

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