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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

I work with both node and Python. The difference in upgrade experiences is measured in several orders of magnitude. My most recent few projects jumped Python versions because features I wanted were introduced. I cannot remember a time I had to rewrite application code because of an upgraded Python version (well I do, it was the Python 2 to 3 migration a very long time ago).

In the meantime new node versions constantly break backwards compatibility. Upgrading packages is a mess. Runtime environments are not properly isolated, third party packages sometimes explicitly do not work with specific versions of node, etc. For a community so focused on creating tooling, it has the worst tools of any ecosystem I have seen. I would rather work with C than with node.

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Really, can you give a more specific example? I have never had a node upgrade break my code, and would be fairly surprised if I were to run into that situation! I also don't quite understand your other points - runtime environments are isolated, that's the point of the node_modules folder, and it's one of the things that Node/NPM does particularly well at. Were you installing your packages globally?

You must be lucky. Anything the relies on their floating ABI breaks on every update (C dependencies are very common for certain tasks)

Yeah it’s pretty much this. Something simple like scss/sass breaks a little too often but that’s the easy case. When it’s a Postgres driver it gets even more interesting.

See my other comment but also npm is installed globally and global packages are available so there is no isolation. Compare to Python where a virtual env is complete with a separate copy of the Python interpreter, associated tools (pip, etc.), and only local packages are available. And best of all, you can call binaries inside the virtual env from outside it as normal executables and it just works. No need to mess with $PATH or set any other env variables, just call ./venv/bin/foobar and foobar will run in the context of that venv. Recreating this on a different machine is amazingly simple if you can use one of the already available Python binaries on that system, and trivial if not (compiling Python takes a few minutes and there are lots of tools that will make that process even simpler than the two commands you need to do it). People talk about Docker being the universal environment to run things but Python development doesn’t even need that 99% of the time. And the standard library is chock full of sane, performant modules that allow you to do everything you need, from asyncio to parsing arcane binary formats. My installed packages typically number in dozens, not thousands like JS, because the standard library provides so much already.

Using only the bundled APIs of node and python, I feel like python breaks more often, like for example the useless rename from `collections` to `collections.abc`.

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