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> Are there any other programming languages whose package-management comes close to this level of intricacy and complexity? I think many do. Ruby, Node, Erlang
by myalphabet 7y ago
> Are there any other programming languages whose package-management comes close to this level of intricacy and complexity?
I think many do. Ruby, Node, Erlang/Elixir, Java, Go, Rust, dotnet, C... I’m having trouble thinking of a modern language that doesn’t have such package management mechanisms.
For many people doing anything more than writing one-off scripts, and especially for anyone who collaborates with others or shares their code, package management is so much more than just “this project needs package X”.
- josteink 7y agoBut all your examples are simple and reliable tools with a minimum of intricacy. My criticism isn’t about having a package-management story. It’s about having a terrible and complex one.
- myalphabet 7y agoYour original comment was responding to “create, manage virtual environments(using venv) apart from managing requirements file(Pipfile) and an npm like locking mechanism, dependency graphs, dev dependencies and more.” and saying that this is overly complicated. Yet every single one of the listed languages has package management tools that do all of these things. If you think any of the listed examples have “simple” package management tools, I question how deeply you have used any of them. NPM has ~60 commands and hundreds of subcommands each with multiple option flags, and probably hundreds more config options. Gem/Bundle is similar, etc. If anything, Python is trying to catch up in how complex it’s package managers can be.
- josteink 7y agoPython only has venvs because it needs venvs. For most other language-provided package-managers the software project you’re working on is the env, so you don’t need to construct or manage a venv at all. So my point still stands.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]