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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Yes, explaining to a beginer how to bootstrap python is hell because windows, mac and linux keeps making sure nothing work the same.

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Actually, explaining how to get Python working on Windows is far, far easier than on either linux (modulo various distros) or the Mac. That's because there is one obvious distribution of Python to use, the official one, and new versions of it are always consistent and play well together.

Yes you can use Anaconda if you want, and people who do that are probably data scientists or something and know what they want to do and why. It's well documented and has it's own robust ecosystem.

I say this as someone who's been on Macs at home since 2007 and works professionally on Linux, but I started with Python on Windows back in 2002.

> That's because there is one obvious distribution of Python to use

Lol, no. There is one in the Windows appstore too, which has issues with privileges. And I'm almost sure now MS ships it in some other tool too.

I wonder what percentage of the six people who use Windows app store have found that situation confusing.

You may be surprised outside of the HN crowd how many people use that crappy app store.

Fun fact, if you type "python" in a cmd in windows 10 but no command is found, it opens the windows store and prompt you to install python from there.

I don't doubt the factuality of that statement but the fun part is definitely questionable.

Unfortunatly windows has plenty of problems too. First, the system PATH will kick you if of you have more than one python installed, so the official installer does not add to it by default, hence the python command doesn't work after an install. Instead, you get the py launcher, but it's not provided if you installed python from the app store or with anaconda.

The you have powershell permission system.

It's a ton of fun.

". . . and then he installed cygwin, and decided to manage and run python through the bash environment. . . " (fun fact: the git client's bash shell is actually cygwin. Also; MobaXTerm has cygwin bundled-in as well).

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