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Python basically requires containers unless you are OK with it bit-rotting every six months or so. At least, this used to be the case for trivial python, and recently was the case for stuff that uses cuda.

I stopped paying attention the third time they redefined matrix arithmetic semantics. That happened to be around the 100th time I was sent a script and it only ran on the author’s machine. Maybe they will fix it some day. When they do, I will not believe it.

In contrast, TS has a much nicer type system and better async support. It runs well on web, mobile, desktop and server. Yes, sometimes you have to ship node.js or a whole web browser, but the tooling for that is slightly less insane than the analogous tooling for python.

Its language interoperability story is slightly nicer too (invoke native code, or use wasm). It’s UI story is much, much better since it reuses all the web stuff.

Pip practically invented the supply chain attack; npm perfected it. That’s probably a draw.

Of course, if you care about performance, then other choices make more sense. If you’re training a model then python probably still wins, but very few customers have a $1M+ machine.

by ubercore5 hours ago|

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`uv` helps but it's new, and I don't think it has the same mindshare yet on "I just globally want to install this thing that needs an interpreter/runtime", so Python probably just doesn't come first to mind.

by svachalek5 hours ago|

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I'd put it on this. In my experience Python is fine for scripting your own machine but an obnoxious platform to distribute code on. It's very fragile to version changes, in both directions; I don't know how many things I've seen that only run on 3.10, not 3.9 or 3.11. Its packaging system is global by default which only compounds this because everything needs a specific version but they're all dumped in the same place. And it tends to have a lot of native code as dependencies, leading to all the issues of needing to either have the right build environment or a runtime environment that's already been built for.