undefined | Better HN

0 pointszahlman9mo ago0 comments

> Again, there's a reason basically no other programming language ecosystem needs them.

You have failed to explain how they are meaningfully different from what other programming language ecosystems use to create isolated environments, such that I should actually care about the difference.

Again: activating the venv is not in any way necessary to use it. The only relevant components are some empty folders, `pyvenv.cfg` and a symlink to the Python executable (Windows' nonsense notwithstanding).

> 20 years ago (or whenever they were created), where they didn't even bother to do their homework and see what other ecosystems did to solve that specific problem.

Feel free to state your knowledge of what other ecosystems did to solve those problems at the time, and explain what is substantively different from what a venv does and why it's better to do it that way.

No, a .jar is not comparable, because either it vendors its dependencies or you have to explain what classpath to use. And good luck if you want to have multiple versions of Java installed and have the .jar use the right one.

> They're a bad, leaky, abstraction. They provide value through a mechanism that is cumbersome and doesn't even work well compared to basically all competing solution used outside of Python.

You have failed to demonstrate this, and it does not match my experience.

> it has sooo many braindead ideas (like setup.py having arbitrary code in it :-| )

You know that setup.py is not required for packaging pure-Python projects, and hasn't been for many years? And that it only appears in a source distribution and not in wheels? And that in other ecosystems where packages contain arbitrary code in arbitrary foreign languages that needs to be built on the end user's machine, the package also includes arbitrary code that gets run at install time in order to orchestrate that build process? (For that matter, Linux system packages do this; see e.g. https://askubuntu.com/questions/62534 .)

Yes, using arbitrary code to specify metadata was braindead. Which is why pyproject.toml exists. And do keep in mind that the old way was conceived of in a fundamentally different era.

0 comments

oblio9mo ago

> And do keep in mind that the old way was conceived of in a fundamentally different era.

Maven first appeared in 2004 (and took the Java world by storm, it was widely adopted within a few years). Not studying prior art seems to happen a lot in our field.

> Feel free to state your knowledge of what other ecosystems did to solve those problems at the time, and explain what is substantively different from what a venv does and why it's better to do it that way.

Maven leverages the Java CLASSPATH to avoid them entirely.

There is a single, per-user, shared repository.

So every dependency is stored only once.

The local repository is actually more or less an incomplete clone of the remote repository, which makes the remote repository really easy to navigate with basic tools (the remote repo can be an Apache hosted anywhere, basically).

The repository is name spaced and things are very neatly grouped up by multiple levels (groupId, artifactId, version, type).

When you build or run something through Maven, you need:

1. The correct JAVA in your PATH. 2. A pom.xml config file in your folder (yes, Maven is THAT old, from back when XML was cool).

That's it.

You don't need to activate anything, ever.

You don't need to care about locations of whatamajigs in project folders or temp folders or whatever.

You don't need symlinks.

One of the many Maven packaging plugins spits out the correct package format you need for your platform.

Maven does The Right ThingTM, composing the correct CLASSPATH for your specific project/folder.

There is NO concept of a "virtual env", because ALL envs, by default, are "virtual". They're all compartmentalized by default. Nobody's stepping on anyone else's toes.

You take that plus Java's speed, so no need for slightly faster native dependencies (except in very rare cases), and installing or building a Maven project you've never seen in your life is trivial (unless the authors went to great lenghts to avoid that for some weird reason).

Now THAT's design.

Python has a hodge-podge of a programming language ecosystem with a brilliant beginner-friendly programming language syntax UX (most languages in the future will basically look like Python's pseudo-pseudocode), that's slowly starting to look like something that's actually been designed as a programming ecosystem. Similar story to Javascript, actually.

Anyway, this was more of a rant. I know Python is fixing these sins of its infancy.

I'm happy it's doing that because it's making my life a bit more liveable.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse