that's not good enough. If I'm in the business of writing Python code, I (ideally) don't want to _also_ be in the business of working around Python design deficiencies. Either solve the problem definitively, or do not try to solve the problem at all, because the middle road just leads to endless headaches for people WHILE ALSO disincentivizing a better solution.
Node has better dependency management than Python- And that's really saying something.
I don't see why it should be so binary. I said it "mostly" just works because there are no packaging systems which do exactly what you want 100% of the time.
I've had plenty of problems with node, for example. You mentioned nix, which is much better, but also comes with tons of hard trade-offs.
If a packaging tool doesn't do what i wanted, but I can understand why, and ultimately the tool is not to blame, that's fine by me. The issues I can think of fit reasonably well within this scope:
- requirement version conflicts: packages are updated by different developers, so sometimes their requirements might not be compatible with each other. That's not pip's fault, and it tells you what the problem is so you can resolve it.
- code that's not compatible with updated packages: this is mainly down to requirement versions which are specified too loosely, and not the fault of pip. If you want to lock dependencies to exact versions (like node does by default) you can do this too (with requirements.txt). It's a bit harsh to blame pip for not doing this for you, it's like blaming npm for not committing your package.lock. It would be better if your average python developer was better at this.
- native library issues: some packages depend on you having specific libraries (and versions thereof) installed, and there's not much that pip can do about that. This is where your "ssl issues" come from. This is pretty common in python because it's used so much as "glue" between native libraries -- all the most fun packages are wrappers around native code. This has got a lot better in the past few years with manylinux wheels (which include native libraries). These require a lot of non-python-specific work to build, so i don't blame pip where they don't exist.
It's not perfect, but it's not a big enough deal to rant about or reject entirely if you would otherwise get a lot of value out of the ecosystem.
The thing is, most people who are writing python code are not in the business of writing python code. They're students, scientists, people with the word "business" or "analyst" in their title. They have bigger fish to fry than learning a different language ecosystem.
It took 30 years to get them to switch from excel to python. I think it's unrealistic to expect that they're going to switch from python any time soon. So for better or worse, these are problems that we have to solve.
that's not good enough. If I'm in the business of writing Python code, I (ideally) don't want to _also_ be in the business of working around Python design deficiencies. Either solve the problem definitively, or do not try to solve the problem at all, because the middle road just leads to endless headaches for people WHILE ALSO disincentivizing a better solution.
Node has better dependency management than Python- And that's really saying something.