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Comment by billdueber | Hacker News Reader

I'm kind of interested in this space -- can anyone point me at an article that goes over why this is harder for python than it seems to be for, e.g., ruby? Is there something inherent about the way code is imported in python that makes it less tractable? Or is it just that the python world has never quite all come together on something that works well enough?

(Note that I can certainly complain about how `bundler` works in ruby, but these discussions in python-land seem to go way beyond my quibbles with the ruby ecosystem)

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The big problem is that Python is used in a lot of different contexts and has too many valid ways in which people are able to build, compile, release non-Pythonic extensions in their package. Original way for packaging code was effectively an executable script which made some things easy, but other things much harder. Modern efforts are trying to limit the flexibility of the package definitions without breaking all of this legacy code. I unfairly think of Ruby as only for Ruby on Rails, so only ever dealing with the web domain.

Here is a story about the nightmare it takes to compile the Fortran code that supports much of SciPy (backbone numerical computing library with algorithms for wide swaths of disciplines) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38196412

It's not. Just that Guido never cared about packaging, so it was left to a ragtag unpaid motley crew to piece together and later learn from industry practices that solidified a decade or two after they started.

Python's import system, as it is, makes some things slightly more complicated due to the need to use virtual environments (copies of the interpreter with separate library paths) as opposed to something like node_modules. This could easily be changed, if the powers-that-be actually cared about packaging. Packaging is handled by a separate group, which likes design by committee, and which enables the creation of separate third party tools instead of standardising on one good tool (uv, rye, and poetry, are all popular tools made by people who are explicitly not members of the packaging group).

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