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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Python is starting to feel a bit like JavaScript circa 2014. Remember grunt, gulp, webpack, coffeescript, babel? Now we've got pyright, mypy, pyrefly, black, ruff, ty, flake8, poetry, uv...

I used to find this kind of tooling explosion exhausting (and back then with JS it truly was), but generally speaking it's a good sign that the community is hungry to push things forward. Choice is good, as long as we keep the Unix spirit alive: small, composable tools that play nicely together and can be interchanged.

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Interestingly besides typescript, javascript in 2025 is still super fragmeneted but by a bunch of well-polished tools that all do approximately the same thing. esbuild/vite(rollup)/trubopack(swc), prettier/biome/oxc, npm/bun/pnpm/yarn, bun/node/deno/worker-runtimes

The fact that you even didn't mention webpack, once a champion, is especially sad.

Doesn't Next.js still use webpack?

It's turbopack time: https://nextjs.org/blog/next-16-beta

It's just people refusing to use new tools. Prettier is so much slower than any Rust formatter, it's painful. `yarn install` takes forever. Why not switch to Bun? It's 5 minutes.

I interviewed at one company a few months ago and they said they don't use TypeScript because the compiler gets in their way, jesus chirst.

For me it is easy, Spring/Quarkus/ASP.NET, if it has to be a JavaScript framework, Next.js the way Vercel intended.

Anything whatever the FE team feels like using, and the less I know about it, the better.

Next.js has been called infuriating here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45099922

I know, search for my nickname and you'll get my point of view across several comments.

It's not really that bad. Unless you want to be adventurous you need these tools:

* uv: project management, formatting

* Pyright: type checking

* Pylint: linting (this is probably optional though I would strongly recommend it). Ruff is an option but I don't think it is quite as comprehensive yet.

There are alternatives for those tools but they are pretty clearly the best options at the moment. There's nothing in uv's league, and the only alternatives in Pyright's league is BasedPyright. Hopefully Ty and Pyrefly will be good options in future but I don't think they're ready for production use just yet.

A lot of the tools you list here are composable, mypy checks type hints, black formats code, because of the purpose and design ethos of those two tools they would never think to merge.

So which is it that you want, to just reach for one tool or have tools that have specific design goals and then have to reach for many tools in a full workflow?

FWIW Astral's long term goal appears to be to just reach for one tool, hence why you can now do "uv format".

"There can be only one" - just need to wait till the deathmatches are over.

"grunt, gulp, webpack, coffeescript, babel" --- except no one uses these anymore and they are dead outside of legacy software.

The problem with the python tooling is no one can get it right. There aren't clear winners for a lot of the tooling.

I think that's the point. Every now and then a language will have a small explosion of new tooling, and all you can really do is wait for it to blow over and see what tools people adopted afterwards, it feels like Python is going through a period like that at the moment.

Is there any meaningful difference between TS and Python?

One uses runtimes that ship a state of the art JIT compiler, whereas the other is only now giving the first steps.

Yes there are alternatives to CPython, unfortunely they aren't adopted as much as they should.

Pity that is all looking like Rewrite in Rust looking for solution, instead of actually improving JIT tooling capabilities.

There is a reason us old timers mostly wait on the sidelines until the dust settles.

We have seen this movie already too many times.

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