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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Two interesting options for everyday scripting are Python and Powershell.

A nice part of PowerShell: you can `Add-Type` and embed C#/F# when you want.

I am unhappy with python. It degrades fast. It deprecates libraries every minor release and that tends to break the applications I use. Recent examples are distutils and opsaudio.

Thats why venv exists. Much better solution than lock files.

Doesn't help much because even the standard library bitrots after enough Python releases. I have things I write today but can't run on a NAS that has older Python. No issues like that with Powershell for example.

I dunno what issues you are running into, but generally, code from old Python should work fine under new releases if you are developing, you just have to set up your venv right up front and install the specific version of libraries that don't have modern Python code.

I still work on projects that were written under 3.6.

If you care enough, you can also use something like asdf to install an older Python alongside the system one.

For everyday scripting -- the types of things where I'd be writing in bash but get frustrated with it and switch to python -- I nearly always only need what's in the stdlib.

Sure, for "applications", the ecosystem can be frustrating at times, but I don't think that's what we're talking about here.

you won't believe how powerful Python is with libraries. ChatGPT and Claude made a brand new browser, that isn't based on Chromium or Firefox, and yet still follows many aspects of layout correctly. I read the article we're discussing ("stop designing languages") on this browser and I'm currently using it to post this reply.

Knowing that LLM’s have been extensively trained on public code, I wonder how much of it is based on Chromium or Firefox.

That's a good question! You can read through the entire source code for the latest version:

https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/jan2026/171toy-browser.py.t...

it doesn't look like it would be easily derived from Chromium or Firefox, because this code is Python and those don't use Python this way.

By the way is there any feature you'd like to see added to the toy browser? The goal is that one day it's a replacement for Chrome, Firefox, etc. It's being built by ChatGPT and Claude at the moment. Let me know if there are any feature ideas you have that would be cool to add.

A python-based browser? What are you using for the GUI toolkit?

>A python-based browser? What are you using for the GUI toolkit?

Great questions. 1. Yes, for the moment. Like the title of this article suggests - we're using a library! :)

It's great to iterate in Python, which has a large ecosystem of libraries. Believe it or not, there is a chance that in the future it would be able to translate the language into a different one (for example, C++) while using C++ bindings for the same gui libraries. This would speed up its actions by 40x. However, not all of the libraries used have C++ bindings so it could be harder than it looks.

2. Here's the current version of the source code:

https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/jan2026/171toy-browser.py.t...

you can have a quick read through. Originally it was using tkinter for the GUI toolkit. I believe it is still using tkinter, but the AI might be leaning on some other library. As you read it, is it using anything but tkinter for the GUI toolkit?

These libraries are doing a lot of heavy lifting, but I think it is still ending up drawing in tkinter (not handing off rendering to any other library.)

Python is actually kind of awkward for this use case since you can't import from other files easily unless you are in a proper Python package, which isn't usually the case for everyday scripting.

Lol what.

Python lets you dynamically import from anywhere. The syntax is a bit funky, but thats what llms are for.

No it doesn't. You can't do something like `import ../../foo/bar`. You can mess around with PYTHONPATH and importlib to work around that but that's a horrible hack that also breaks all tooling. Not a good idea.

With Deno you can just import by relative file path and it just works like you'd expect and the tools support it. I wish more languages worked like that.

> You can't do something like `import ../../foo/bar`.

https://docs.python.org/3/reference/import.html#relativeimpo...

You'd use:

  import ...foo.bar

Common misconception. That doesn't import by relative file path; it imports by relative package path. It's actually quite different. Scripts you run directly aren't in a package so you can't use it at all. You can go above the package root. Namespace packages mean it can jump to other directories.

Everyone wants that to just mean "import relative to this file" but it doesn't.

>You can mess around with PYTHONPATH and importlib to work around that but that's a horrible hack that also breaks all tooling

....no.

import keyword uses importlib under the hood. It just does a lot of things for you like setting up namespace. But importlib has all the functionality to add the code in any python file cleanly.

My custom agent that I use basically has the functionality to wrap every piece of code it writes as a tool and stores it into python files. During tool calls, it pretty much dynamically imports that code as part of a module within the project. Works perfectly fine.

> Works perfectly fine.

Unless you want to use type checkers, linters, IDEs, etc.

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