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Comment by loks0n | Hacker News Reader

Feels like Astral are going to eat the whole python eventually.

Makes me wonder, did the Python core team fail to see the opportunity in python tooling, have no desire to build it, or they didn't have the skills?

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The python team build python. I suspect that insulates them from the actual problems of trying to build things with python. Also this sort of thing gets bogged down in approval processes. People have spent decades trying to "fix" python packaging; the important thing is that uv doesn't change any of that, it's a drop in replacement.

Yeah it reminds me of bun, for node, in that way (and that probably exposes how well I understand tooling). It's like somebody just swept everything off the table and started over.

I never learned python the way I wanted to because for years I would first look at the excruciating transition from v2 to v3 and just not see a point of entry for a newb like me.

Now the same thing is happening with tooling for v3. pip? pepenv? python pip? python3 pip? I don't freakin' know. Now there's uv, and I'm kinda excited to try again.

For years Python has been build on a skeleton crew.

Especially compared to billions poured into Javascript ecosystem due to it being native language of the web. The money for Python was never there, even when it become the top language of data engineering and data science. Even now, devs that improve Python ecosystem get fired: https://bsky.app/profile/snarky.ca/post/3lp5w5j5tws2i

If you take a look at the forum (https://discuss.python.org/), the core team basically doesn't have the resources to do anything else expect maintaining Python. They aren't paid and have to pick their battles.

They spend a lot of time on improving Python itself and then you have pip which is a way to install packages and that's it; it's not a package manager nor a python version manager.

To be fair here, the recent PEPs encourage external build back ends (which this submission is about).

That said, the people left in the CPython team generally have a low regard for bloat-free, correct and fast solutions, so external solutions are most welcome.

Rewriting proven working tools from scratch has the benefit of knowing the pain points, but it also a huge chore that may break a lot of things.

I don't blame the core python team for not super optimizing tools like Astral.

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