I’m on board with most of this. The one suggestion I’d add is to replace “make” with “just”
Just is fantastic for any project - also non-code ones!
I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
451–460 of 718 posts
Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
Virtual environments are useful for isolating dependencies for different projects, not just isolating the interpreter. (I mean, except on Windows, your venvs default to symlinking the interpreter and other shared bits, so you aren't really isolating the interpreter at all, just the dependencies.)
AFAIK, it's the same even on POSIX, when you create a venv, "./bin/python" are symlinks and the pyvenv.cfg has a hardcoded absolute path of the current python interpreter the venv module was using at the time of creation. It really doesn't isolate the interpreter. (also one of the reasons why, if you're invoking venv manually, you absolutely need to invoke it from the correct python as a module (`python3.13 -m venv`)…
I meant that the symlink behavior is default except on Windows (though it may just be on POSIX platforms and I think of it as “except Windows” because I don't personally encounter Python on non-Windows non-POSIX platforms.)
Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
“broken” is hyperbole. It works fine for millions of people every day. If you have some specific scenarios where you want it be better, it’s better to say those rather than just complain about an open source project.
Millions of people put it into Docker, or they just deal with it and you see the results with tons of Stackoverflow questions
> Millions of people put it into Docker, or they just deal with it and you see the results with tons of Stackoverflow questions
Arrogantly wrong.
I've coded in Python for almost 20 years. Many of those years I've had it as my primary language at work.
2024 was the first year I actually needed a virtualenv. Before that, I'd happily use pip to install whatever I want, and never had a version conflict that caused problems.
I often encounter junior folks who default to using a virtualenv, not because they need to, but because they've been brainwashed into believing that "you're doing it wrong if you don't use one".
In any case, people should use uv these days.
Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#454Just a small note on the code in the linked script: API_KEY = os.environ.get("YOUTUBE_API_KEY") CHANNEL_ID = os.environ.get("YOUTUBE_CHANNEL_ID") if not API_KEY or not CHANNEL_ID: print("Missing YOUTUBE_API_KEY or YOUTUBE_CHANNEL_ID.") exit(1) Presenting the user with "Missing X OR Y" when there's no reason that OR has to be there massively frustrates the user for the near zero benefit of having one fewer if statemen…
Even slightly better is to first check both
if not API_KEY and not CHANNEL_ID:
print("Missing both YOUTUBE_API_KEY and YOUTUBE_CHANNEL_ID.")
exit(1)
if not API_KEY:
print("Missing YOUTUBE_API_KEY.")
exit(1)
if not CHANNEL_ID:
print("Missing YOUTUBE_CHANNEL_ID.")
exit(1)
Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
The syntax is exactly two, not 2-5.
I think the point was: who can know by looking at it.
Anyone using a monospacdd font, a font where underscores are separated, or a run-together proportional font that they are even a little bit familiar with, because of the relative width of underscores and other characters.
Which, between them, covers approximately everyone.
Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#456When did Python go out of fashion? This is the second article I've seen talking about it as if it's some kind abomination. I get that it's not the shiny new thing, but I don't understand people hating on it. Is this just junior devs who never learned it, or is there some new language out that I missed? (And please don't tell me Javascript....)
I coded happily in python for many years and fell out of love with it. It doesn’t ship with a first party package manager so you got the community trying to fill this gap. Use any other language with good tooling like golang or rust and it is a breath of fresh air. Python used as an actual PL is a footgun because it’s dynamic scripted. (Don’t tell me about using tools X, Y, Z, mypy, …) You essentially become the comp…
> Don’t tell me about using tools X, Y, Z, mypy, …
What's wrong with using tools that improve on common issues? I don't think I'd use Python without them, but ruff and pyright make Python a very productive and reliable language if you're willing to fully buy into the static analysis.
Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is this just junior devs who never learned it Seems more like it's fallen out of favor with senior devs who have moved to Go/Rust.
I don’t know anything about go. But Rust is more of a competitor to C and C++, right? It is sort of bizarre if these languages are butting heads with a scripting language like Python. Python compares fairly well to Bash or JavaScript or whatever, right? (Maybe JavaScript is better, I don’t know anything about it).
Rust has language features (often inspired by functional programming languages) that allow you to write pretty high level code.
Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#458> Not only because the syntax is more human-friendly, but also because the Python interpreter is natively integrated in all Unix distros That's kind of very optimistic evaluation - literally anything beyond "import json" will likely lead you into the abyss of virtual envs. Running something created with say Python 3.13.x on Ubuntu 22.04 or even 24.04 (LTSs) / Rocky 9 and the whole can of worms opened. things like vir…
I have a silly theory that I only half joke about that docker/containers wouldn't've ever taken off as fast as it did if it didn't solve the horrible python dependency hell so well. You know something is bad when fancy chrooting is the only ergonomic way of shipping something that works. My first taste of Python was as a sysadmin, back in 2012 or so, installing a service written in Python on a server. The dependency…
I won't touch Python either, but because I've been burned debugging large Python programs. Something that would have taken a minute in a statically typed language took hours of tracing data through the program to understand what was supposed to be in a dict. There are alternative languages that are pithy, statically typed, can write programs quickly, and can grow into large code bases that are maintainable; so there is never a reason to start a new project with Python today.
Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s still 20 years of projects using everything that became before uv. They didn’t upgrade the moment uv came into existence. Data science-land still uses other rubbish too.
> They didn’t upgrade the moment uv came into existence. There's also projects that can't use `uv` because it doesn't like their current `requirements.txt`[0] and I have no bandwidth to try and figure out how to work around it. [0] We have an install from `git+https` in there and it objects strongly for some reason. Internet searches have not revealed anything helpful.
If you open even a brief issue and tag me @zanieb I'm happy to take a look!
Re: I'm switching to Python and actually liking it
#460I’m on board with most of this. The one suggestion I’d add is to replace “make” with “just”
I hear about it every now and again and I can't seem to grok the benefit. What's the killer feature over make?
If you're an expert in make and already have a Makefile, I would not recommend switching to just for that project.
The benefit of just is that it's designed to be a command runner, whereas make is designed to be a build tool. justfile syntax is much simpler and more ergonomic. It also has nice features: Private recipes, submodules, recipes that you can specify to run only in a particular OS (we use the same justfile for both Windows and Linux), writing your recipes in a language other than your shell language, and many many other niceties.
A new user can start doing "advanced" stuff in just in a couple of hours. They'll take a lot longer if trying to do it via make.