Sure, but if tomorrow uv and ruff ceased to exist, we could all go back to any number of other solutions.
I'm done pretending this is a "right tools for the right job" kind of thing, there's wrong people in the right job, and they only know python. If no one self-writes code anymore anyway, at least use a language that isn't a clusterfuck of bad design decisions, and has 1 trillion lines of code in the collective memory of people who don't know what a stack is.
I can get behind the idea that LLM's probably don't need a language designed for humans if humans arent writing it, but the rest of this is just daft. Pythons popularity isn't just pure luck, in fact its only been in recent years that the tooling has caught up to the point where its as easy to setup as it is to write, which should really tell you something if people persevered with it anyway.
I'm sorry your favourite language doesnt have the recognition it so rightfully deserves, but reducing python to just "stupid language for stupid people" is, well, stupid
Speaking as a grey beard myself, I think its safe to say that the grey beards among us will always deride those who didn't have to work as hard as they did.
I used to do backend development in superior languages, and sometimes do hobby frontend in superior languages, but my work is Python now. And it kind of has to be Python: we do machine learning, and I work with GDAL and PDAL and all these other weird libraries and everything has Python bindings! I search for "coherent point drift" and of course there's a Python library.
The superior languages I mentioned... perhaps they have like a library for JSON encoding and decoding. You need anything else? Great, now you're a library author and maintainer!
To make it good, you need to review and interate.
we may want to invent something akin to concise math notion, but not so much, in between pseudo-code and math.
https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/
* disclosure: We are a commercial client of astral.sh
Circa 2017 I was working on systems that were complex enough that pip couldn't build them and after I got to the bottom of it I knew it not my fault but it was the fault of pip.
I built a system which could build usable environments out of pre-built wheels and sketched out the design of a system that was roughly 'uv but written in Python' but saw two problems: (1) a Python dependent system can be destroyed by people messing with Python environments, like my experience is that my poetry gets trashed every six months or so and (2) there was just no awareness by the 'one tiny project on your machine that pips in four packages' people that there was a correctness problem at all and everybody else was blaming themselves for a problem and didn't have a clear understanding of what was wrong with pip or what a correct model for managing python dependencies is (short answer: see maven) or that a 100% correct model was even possible and that we'd have to always settle for a 97% model. The politics looked intractable so I gave up.
Now written in rust, uv evaded the bootstrap problem and it dealt with the adoption problem by targeting 'speed' as people would see the value in that even if they didn't see the value in 'correctness'. My system would have been faster than pip because it would have kept a cache, but uv is faster still.
I have used them all and UV is the only one that actually solves the problem.
It’s insane that people would suggest that Python can go back.
I always looked down on the Java ecosystem but if it turns out Maven had a better story all along and we all overlooked it, that's wild.
> The politics looked intractable so I gave up.
So yeah, this is your actual problem. (Don’t worry, I’m in the same camp here.)
Having a static binary makes distribution way simplier. There are a bunch of ways you could try to achive something like in python but it would be significantly larger.
Performance-wise writing it in python would have heavy startup overhead and wouldn't be able to get close to the same level of performance.
Obviously you could achive the same thing in many other languages, but rust ends up being a really good fit for making a small static binary for this workload of network heavy, IO-bound, async/threading friendly with the occasional bit of CPU heavy work.
you mean pdm?
Poetry having users isn’t the metric for success. pip having way less users is.
Poetry's CLI would often, for me, just fall over and crash. Crashing a lot is not a fundamental problem in the sense you can fix the bugs, but hey I'm not hitting uv crashes.
pipenv was even worse in terms of just hanging during package resolution. Tools that hang are not tools you want in a CI pipeline!
The end result: `uv run` I expect to work. `pipenv` or `poetry` calls I have to assume don't work, have to put retries into CI pipelines and things like that.
But yes, in terms of user interface they are pretty similar. UV performance really does make the difference.
I think I have trauma from virtual environments...
What exactly is the issue with this?
`uv run` a .py with inline script metadata has all the deps installed and your script running in a venv while poetry is still deciding to resolve...
(I'm not doing this to be a dick, I genuinely want to know what the use case is)
Things got bearable with virtualenv/virtualenv wrappers, but it was never what I would call great. Pip was always painful, and slow. I never looked forward to using them - and every time I worked on a new system - the amount of finaggling I had to do to avoid problems, and the amount of time I spent supporting other people who had problems was significant.
The day I first used uv (about is as memorable to me as the the day I first started using python (roughly 2004) - everything changed.
I've used uv pretty much every single day since then and the joy has never left. Every operation is twitch fast. There has never once been any issues. Combined with direnv - I can create projects/venvs on the fly so quickly I don't even bother using it's various affordances to run projects without a venv.
To put it succinctly - uv gives me two things.
One - zero messing around with virtualenvwrappers and friends. For whatever reason, I've never once run into an error like "virtualenvwrapper.sh: There was a problem running the initialization hooks."
Two - fast. It may be the fastest software I've ever used. Everything is instant - so you never experience any type of cognitive distraction when creating a python project and diving into anything - you think it - and it's done. I genuinely look forward to uv pip install - even when it's not already in cache - the parallel download is epically fast - always a joy.
But - neither the speed nor constant issues with pip/virtualenvwrappers are really a function of the OS/File System.
A frequent theme in this thread (probably most clearly described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47444936) is that relying on your Python Environment to manager your Python Environment - always ends up in pain. Poetry had this issue as well.
One of the key architectural decisions of Astral was to write the Python Environment Management tooling in rust - so that it could never footgun itself.
It also benefited from very enlightened engineering decisions described here: https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/26/how-uv-got-so-fast.html
You can run a script with a one liner and it will automatically get you the same python and venv and everything as whoever distributed the python code, in milliseconds if the packages are already cached on your local computer.
Very easy to get going without even knowing what a venv or pypi or anything is.
If you are already an expert you get “faster simpler tooling” and if you are a complete beginner it’s “easy peasy lemon squeezy”.
it just works. i'm not sure how else to describe it other than less faffing about. it just does the right thing, every time. there's a tiny learning curve (mostly unlearning bad or redundant habits), but once you know how to wield it, it's a one stop shop.
and as mentioned, it's crazy fast.
You should really qualify that statement, it implies that the Python ecosystem is bearable.
See the point ?
...and then I’ve read the rest of your comment. Please do go read the HN guidelines.
Such an outcome would make me wonder regarding the wisdom of "It is better to have love and lost than to have never loved at all."
Note that uv is fast because — yes, Rust, but also because it doesn’t have to handle a lot of legacy that pip does[1], and some smart language independent design choices.
If uv became unavailable, it’d suck but the world would move on.
Like, the whole point of open source is that this thread is not a thing. The whole point is "if this software is taken on by a malevolent dictator for life, we'll just fork it and keep going with our own thing." Or like if I'm evaluating whether to open-source stuff at a startup, the question is "if this startup fails to get funding and we have to close up shop, do I want the team to still have access to these tools at my next gig?" -- there are other reasons it might be in the company's interests, like getting free feature development or hiring better devs, but that's the main reason it'd be in the employees' best interests to want to contribute to an open-source legacy rather than keep everything proprietary.
Projects - including forks - fail all the time because the leadership/product direction on a project goes missing despite the tech still being viable, which is why people are concerned about these people being locked up inside OpenAI. Successfully forking is much easier said than done.
I had a sketched out design for a correct package manager in 2018 but when I talked to people about it I couldn't get any interest in it. I think the brilliant idea that uv had that I missed was that it can't be written in Python because if is written in Python developers are going to corrupt its environment sooner or later and you lose your correctness.
I think that now that people are used to uv it won't be that hard to develop a competitor and get people to switch.
Ruff isn’t stable yet either and has evolved into the de facto standard for new projects. It has more than double the amount of rules than Pylint does. Also downloaded more than 3 times as often as Pylint in the past month.
Pylint has some advantages, sure, but Ruffs adoption speaks for itself. Pylint is 25 years old. You’d hope they do some things better.
Saying that uv is their only winner is a hilarious take.
> I would stare longingly into the void, wondering if I can ever work another python project after having experienced uv, ruff, and ty.
You think you're disagreeing with me, but you're agreeing. To wit: The original post is silly, because ty is beta quality and Ruff isn't stable yet either. Your words.
These are just tools, Pylint included. Use them, don't use then, make them your whole personality to the point that you feel compelled to defend them when someone on the Internet points out their flaws. Whatever churns your butter.
na this news is good enough reason to move from Ruff back to black and stay the course, I won't use anything else from Astral. I will use uv but only until pip 2/++ gets its shit together and catches up and hopefully then as a community we should jump back on board and keep using pip even if it's not as good, it's free in the freedom sense.
Then import that tool and and check if __name__ == "__main__"
The domain I work in is basically perfect for Go, so I've been pushing for that.
Or are you asking why I haven't had success? Mostly because the people I work with are dead set that Python is perfect for everything. I had one guy argue it should be used for embedded work
I had the problem basically understood in 2018 and I am still pissed that everybody wanted to keep taking their chances with pip just like they like to gamble with agent coders today.
Now that people know a decent package manager is possible in Python I think there is going to be no problem getting people to maintain one.
And that's a big part of what's so frustrating about Python generally: it seems to be a language used by lots of people who've never used anything else and have an attitude like "why would I ever try anything else"?
Python has a culture where nominal values of user-friendliness, pragmatism, and simplicity often turn into plain old philistinism.
How do you think the magic of open source resolves this issue? Think about this for it to make some sense
> I would simply fork
The only simple part here is pressing the "fork" button, which only gives you exactly the same code that already exists, without user awareness or distribution
as to how the magic of open source resolves the time and money issue, it literally gives you the building blocks you need to not have to invent everything from scratch. how is that not significant?
And I never said about the relative ease, you've moved the goalpost there yourself. $1m required to maintain is much less than $10m required to create, yet when you don't have $1m it doesn't matter - you'll still fail, and reasons are the same as the reasons you couldn't build the original.
Blocks lying around does not a building make, so you haven't addressed that magic either.
Or, more relevant to this conversion: If they closed source tomorrow, the community could fork the current version.