As with package managers, there seem to be half a dozen different, competing type checkers for Python now...

It's starting to look like the huge embarrassment that is python packaging and environment management. I work with the language every day, and I still have no idea what am I supposed to use between conda, pip, setuptools/setup.py, pyproject, meta.yml, poetry, pipenv, etc...

Conda is so slow that I sometimes wonder if we are being trolled by some cruel God of programming. Pip is faster, but version resolution is iffy.

Hell, even just assigning versions to python packages is nothing short of ridiculous. Do you use version.txt in the root folder and set it manually? Do you have it set from SCM? Which of the half a dozen packages do you use to have it set from SCM? setuptools_scm? Versioneer?

There are a set of tools in the python ecosystem that have basically no equal in any other language and these tools and the surrounding mindshare make python irreplaceable in the near term. The language itself is easy to learn and powerful enough to be able to do data analysis with ease. Good python code is easy on the eyes, which I personally consider an important aspect.

Outside of these tools, core parts of the ecosystem are basically an XKCD joke.

I tried switching to Julia as I find both the language and the ecosystem are vastly superior in their foundations. Unfortunately the maturity is not there yet, and neither is the mindshare. If I had to bet my career on adopting the language in a business setting, I'd not be prepared to do so. Which is a shame, because the situation turns into a Catch-22.

Try mamba instead of conda [0]. It's really fast.

The first time you have to run it as:

    conda install -c conda-forge mamba
From then on, you replace conda with mamba. For example, if you are installing dask-cuda from the rapidsai channel you run it as:

    mamba install -c rapidsai dask-cuda
At this point, mamba is just so much better and faster, that it's the first package I install in an Anaconda environment.

[0] https://github.com/mamba-org/mamba