On the other hand, python’s packaging system is such a mess, I’m not sure the alternative / replacement is actually better. I wish the ecosystem could do better here and had an easy way for people who want to help improve this to do so.
On the other hand, python’s packaging system is such a mess, I’m not sure the alternative / replacement is actually better. I wish the ecosystem could do better here and had an easy way for people who want to help improve this to do so.
Another thing is that many move only the tip and older versions seldom gets fixed. If you introduce a dependency in a core package you take on the work of maintaining that version as long as the core package lives, which may be much longer than the upstream author wants to work on it.
The language ecosystems usually don't bring any stability guarantees. Just because the upstream author thinks a new incompatible version is the bee's knees doesn't mean core packages can suddenly be rewritten in the middle of stable period. So there needs to be a system for maintaining these packages in place anyway.
And if it's something distributions generally know how to do, it's packaging software, so it's pretty natural they use what tools they have available. The outcome isn't always great for the end user who wants unrestricted access to the language ecosystem, but that doesn't there aren't problems to solve here.
And interestingly, Python depends so hard on C because CPython is very slow, and CPython is very slow because the C-extension API is virtually the whole of the CPython interpreter (many interesting optimizations to the interpreter would break compatibility in the ecosystem). So it certainly feels like all of Python's major problems come down to this decision to lean hard on C and specifically to make so much of the interpreter available for the C-extensions.
The way out as far as I can tell is to define some narrower API surface (e.g., https://hpyproject.org), get the ecosystem to consolidate around that, deprecate the old API surface, and then make the requisite breaking optimizations such that the ecosystem can feasibly do more in native Python. This requires leadership; however, and the hard truth is this has not historically seemed to be Python's strong suit--the Python maintainers seem unable to drive out big, necessary changes like this (which is certainly not to say that leadership is easy or that I could do better, particularly when Python is so established in many respects).
Personally, I've come to use Go for 99% of my Python use cases and it's been great. There are dramatically fewer C bindings (<1% of the ecosystem by my crude estimation), so the build/packaging tooling and performance are orders of magnitude better than in Python. Static typing works well out of the box, real static binaries are not only feasible but trivial (as opposed to Python where you try to build a zip file with your dependencies and the result is hundreds of megabytes and it's still missing the runtime, std libs, and various .so files). Further still, builds, tests, and every kind of tooling are far faster than with Python, and far simpler to install and manage. Unless you're doing data science, I don't think you'll regret the transition.
EDIT: On the subject of Python to Go, looks like this case study hit the front page shortly after posting this comment: https://gitlab.com/esr/reposurgeon/-/blob/master/GoNotes.ado...
I just want to point out that while I agree with this, the reason it also clear - lack of manpower. Somehow, despite Python being one of the top 3 most widely used programming languages, most of the critical infrastructure is maintained by very very few people, usually in their spare time.
It's clear to me that there are immature people involved due to the name calling and basically vandalism of "not-three" Python on Debian, in addition to the incredibly smart and long-term committed people that make Debian uniquely great. I wrote email to Chris Lamb directly, but how could he work harder than he did. Herded cats would do better to listen sometimes.
and while I was typing, Perl5 was updated TODAY