Hacker News Reader

Comment by gbin | Hacker News Reader

How many times the virtualenv/pipenv/pyenv/... changed though? The package management also between wheels and setup and all the breakages.

Even for somebody that did not aim to have python programs for 20y, python is definitely not a good example of a "pdf for programs"

View on HN

I dislike Python for that reason. I don't love the offside-rule syntax, but compared to how often I have an issue with software written in Python due to some old/deprecated/broken packaging issue...

I've lately been pretty deep into 3d printing, and basically all the software has Python...and breaks quite easily. Whether because of a new version of Pip with some new packaging rule, forced venvs...I really don't like dealing with Python software.

I used virtualenv for the past 15 years and I don't recall it changing significantly. I don't get why people use new fancy tools like pipenv/pyenv/poetry/uv and then complain that there are too many tools to learn. There is nothing wrong with just using virtualenv. It has its warts but it always worked for me and it's stable.

If you see a wart report it: https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/issues/

I think if you had chased every single latest hotness then you would have hit lots of breakages, but depending on what you are doing and where you are running (and what dependencies you are using) then I think you could easily have something from 10-15 years ago work today. Part of the trick would have been to aware enough to pick the boring long-term options (but at some level that applies to every language and ecosystem), but the other part is understanding what the tools are actually doing and how they are maintained.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com