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Astral to Join OpenAI

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Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#651

Post by mountainriver »

raincole wrote: post #505
mountainriver wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's such a laughable take. First of all a language is never getting popular simply because it's good. Actually most used languages are usually terrible.[0] Secondly it's non factual. Python's market share grew in 2025[1][2][3]. Probably driven by AI demand. [0]: even truer for natural languages. [1]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#most-popular... [2]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#…

Yes most languages are terrible except the ones that are actually performant and good like Rust.

Do you really think AI agents of the future will be coding in Python??? What advantage would that possibly give them? That's the only laughable take here

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#653

Post by PaulHoule »

asa400 wrote: post #576
crdrost wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just the weirdest thread. 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…

The leadership and product direction work are at least as hard as the code work. Astral/uv has absolutely proven this, otherwise Python wouldn't be a boneyard for build tools. 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. Successfu…

I had a lot of trouble convincing people that a correct Python package manager was even possible. uv proved it was possible and won people over with speed.

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.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#654

Post by 20k »

shimman wrote: post #581
palmotea wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed. 1. For the record: the GPL is entirely dependent on copyright. 2. If AI "clean-room" re-implementations are allow to bypass copyright/licenses, the GPL won't protect you.

"Clean room" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Having the entire corpus of knowledge for humanity and how LLMs work, how can you honestly argue in court that this is purely clean room implementation? This is right up there with Meta lawyers claiming that when they torrent it's totally legal but when a single person torrents it's copyright infringement.

Far too many people treat AI as a way to launder copyright, it seems likely that a lot of the current state of outright plagiarism won't stand up in court

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#655

Post by PaulHoule »

eviks wrote: post #542
alsetmusic wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see Apache and MIT license files in their GitHub. What's to prevent the community from forking and continuing development if the licenses change?

The same things that prevented "community" from building the tool in the first place

i think the main problem was that people didn't believe that pip was broken, or didn't think there was any value in a 100% correct package manager over a 97% correct package manager (e.g. misread "worse is better")

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.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#656

Post by JoshTriplett »

aseipp wrote: post #643
JoshTriplett wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were true, Astral wouldn't have been able to build it in the first place. It's an Open Source tool. Perhaps folks excited about working on it can move to the Python Foundation and maintain it there. Perhaps companies who saw today's acquisition and became deeply worried about the future of this tooling could help support and fund such an effort.

Part of the reason Astral as a team is so well liked is precisely because they are not part of the main fold or related to "Core Python"; they are an independent vendor, one that delivered high quality code and listened directly to users and their own (extensive) experience to do so, and they succeeded at that repeatedly. Python packaging has {been seen as, actually been} miserable for years , and so by the same toke…

Fair enough. But that does seem like something that'd depend more on the people than the organization. Whoever forks it will need to be trusted to continue to be "good hands", whatever organization they operate under the auspices of.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#657

Post by jitl »

1718627440 wrote: post #311
jitl wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uv solved it, it will be the only tool people use in 2 more years. if you’re a python shop / expert then you can do pip etc but uv turned incidental python + deps from a huge PITA for the rest of us, to It Just Works simplicity on the same level or better than Golang.

I don't want software on my computer, that just downloads and installs random stuff. This is the job of the OS in particular the package manager.

You're welcome to live in the 90s dark ages, I feel this attitude and the shape of the old linux distros like Debian that laboriously re-package years-old software have been one of the biggest failures of open source and squandered untold hours of human effort. It's a model that works okay for generic infrastructure but requires far too much labor and moves far too slowly with quite a poor experience for end users and developers. Why else would all modern software development (going back to perl's cpan package manager in 1995) route around it?

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#658

Post by vaylian »

mountainriver wrote: post #644
vaylian wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What language is universally better than Python? I don't think Python is perfect, but it is definitely one of the best languages out there. It is elegant and it is has a huge ecosystem of libraries, frameworks and tutorials. There is a lot of battle-tested software in Python that is running businesses.

What?! It's one of the slowest languages on the planet, it's not type safe, it has not real concurrency. I can't believe people say this with a straight face

> It's one of the slowest languages on the planet

It's fast enough for many use cases. That doesn't mean that there is no room for optimization, but this is far less a deciding factor these days.

> it's not type safe

You can do static analysis with Mypy and other tools.

> it has not real concurrency.

There's different mechanisms for running things concurrently in Python. And there's an active effort to remove the GIL. I also have to ask: What is "real" concurrency?

Admittedly, the things you mention are not Python's strongest points. But they are far from being dealbreakers.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#659

Post by jitl »

nullhole wrote: post #389
woodruffw wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a point of information: Astral did not, in fact, burn through its VC money. I agree that dev tools are difficult to monetize, though. (Source: I'm an Astral employee.)

> As a point of order: Astral did not, in fact, burn through its VC money. That's a point of information, not a point of order.

what does that mean

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#660

Post by MidnightRider39 »

FuckButtons wrote: post #418
rob wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a tiny project with over 100 million downloads every month, over 4 million every day. No big deal. Just a small shop, don't overstate its importance. https://pypistats.org/packages/uv

Sure, but if tomorrow uv and ruff ceased to exist, we could all go back to any number of other solutions.

Personally I would stop using Python again. uv is the one thing that made it bearable.
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