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Comment by prasoon2211 | Hacker News Reader

Most people actually using python do not start off in scripts. Usually, I would mess around in IPython / Jupyter for a couple days until I have something I'm happy with. Then I'll "productionize" the project.

tbh this has been a sticking point for me too with uv (though I use it for everything now). I just want to start of a repl with a bunch of stuff installed so I can try out a bunch of stuff. My solution now it to have a ~/tmp dir where I can mess around with all kinds of stuff (not just python) and there I have a uv virtualenv installed with all kinds of packages pre-installed.

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> Usually, I would mess around in IPython / Jupyter for a couple days until I have something I'm happy with. Then I'll "productionize" the project.

Right, it's this. I get the feeling a lot of people here don't work that way though. I mean I can understand why in a sense, because if you're doing something for your job where your boss says "the project is X" then it's natural to start with a project structure for X. But when I'm going "I wonder if this will work..." then I want to start with the code itself and only "productionize" it later if it turns out to work.

>tbh this has been a sticking point for me too with uv (though I use it for everything now). I just want to start of a repl with a bunch of stuff installed so I can try out a bunch of stuff.

I hope the people behind UV or someone else adress this. A repl/notebook thing that is running on a .venv preinstalled with stuff defined in some config file.

> A repl/notebook thing that is running on a .venv preinstalled with stuff defined in some config file.

So, create a project as a playground, put what you want it to include (including something like Jupyter if you want notebooks) in the pyproject.toml and... use it for that?

What do you want a tool to do for that style of exploration that uv doesn't already do? If you want to extract stuff from that into a new, regular project, that maybe could use some tooling, sure, that would take some new tooling.

Do you need a prepackaged set of things to define the right “bunch of stuff” for the starting point? Because that will vary a lot by what your area of exploration is.

    uv run --with=numpy,pandas python

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