Python 2 advocates were quite firm in telling us that Python 3 and its incompatibility with Python 2 had killed Python and people would abandon Python altogether in droves for other languages.

This post is suggesting the opposite, that Python is more healthy than ever and growing incredibly fast.

Three of us (including me), in an academic lab, are making the jump from matlab to python. We use py3 (of Anaconda, on Windows10).

We like it, but we are constantly screaming and bitching about the complications of 2<->3 ("Ahhh X and Y module only works on py2!", "Ahhh device developer only provides example code for Labview and Matlab!", "Ahhh python isn't even supported for this device/application!").

Package management ("Do I use conda? pip? easy_install? compile?") is annoying, I hope that something like hatch (https://github.com/ofek/hatch) maybe takes over everything -- because I think the mess that is package management is THE biggest deterrent for newcomers.

I think the one thing we are all learning from this experience is: JUST USE UBUNTU, doing python with Windows is a headache.

All of that said -- python is nice, it's amazing, it's the newer, funner Java. It is incredibly approachable, it can do pretty much EVERYTHING because of the expansive availability of libraries, it's finally a programming language that is great to get my 7 year old niece started on.

heydonovan

Package management was so frustrating coming from Ruby to Python. There are so many programs, and version conflicts that I run into all the time. With gems and bundler, it was rare if things didn't work.

brianwawok

Really? Pip should be pretty straight forward. Maybe you use different libraries than I do.

ufmace

I do mostly Ruby professionally and dabble in Python, and I agree with heydonovan. Pip works fine for installing things, but near as I can tell, Python has no equivalent of bundler - a tool to install specific versions of a bunch of libraries, generate a lockfile ensuring that your production server and all of the devs are all running it with the same version of everything, and letting you have as many versions of a gem installed as you want, and still running a project with specific versions other than the latest.

brianwawok

pip install -r requirements.txt

Pretty simple, no? Most any python project I have seen in the last 5-6 years uses it.

yen223

requirements.txt don't track transitive dependencies. Your project could break if a dependency decided to swap out its own dependencies. This isn't theoretical either - it happened to us in production.

We are using `pip-tools` to manage that: https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools