alt Hacker News> I had the misfortune of having to use Python with a virtual env on the weekend - it did not end well, and reminded me why I migrated away from Python.
I see this sentiment a lot, and it doesn't match my experience at all.
In my decade-old bubble of using Python professionally, I've never had an issue with virtualenvs. The few issues I might've had with dependency resolution must be so far in the past that I don't remember. But that's not strictly about virtualenvs. Likewise, pip could be clunky, but we don't have to deal with it anymore.
My niche is mostly backend. Other Python niches must be considerably worse in this regard.
I used Python for a decade (professionally), gave up on it once I started using Go (professionally) in earnest - about 8 or 9 years ago.
I never liked virtual envs, having to remember where they were, what their names were, and what was installed into each one was a pain point for me.
This weekend I was trying to learn some AWS stuffs, and I cloned the official repo of example code which was Python. I followed the directions exactly and ... boom Python versioning issues... inside the freaking venv
Who needs that?
Why do I need to spend the better part of a couple of hours debugging a versioning problem? (FTR The problem turned out to be the repo was hardcoded to 3.8 and my local Python was 3.9.. or something along those lines - you are welcome to correct me, but that's what I remember of a painful waste of my time)
With Go I have backward compatibility guarantees - usually (there have been instances in the past where the backward guarantee have been broken AND the build process got broken hard for modules, with the claim that it was external and therefore not subject to the same guarantees)
> I see this sentiment a lot, and it doesn't match my experience at all.
My old HCI professor used to tell me - if users are complaining (or producing workarounds like post-it notes on their monitors) - regardless of how clean or elegant you think the system is - it's not.
You're saying you see people complain about it a lot - therefore it's a genuine problem.