this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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Sorry Python but it is what it is.

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[–] [email protected] 121 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (10 children)
[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (1 children)

npm is objectively worse. Base pip packages aren't getting hijacked.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Maybe I’m misremembering, but didn’t pip have it’s own security concerns earlier this year?

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's not a controversial opinion. I'd say it's worse than pip. At least pip doesn't put nag messages on the console or fill up your hard drive with half a gigabyte of small files. OP is confused.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

npm is so good there are at least 3 alternatives and every package instructs on using a different one.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

In my experience npm is not great but it does work most of the time. I just tried installing bunch of stuff using pip and NONE of them worked. Python is backwards compatibility hell. Python 2 vs 3, dependencies missing, important libraries being forked and not working anymore. If the official installation instructions are 'pip install X' and it doesn't work then what's the point?

npm has A LOT of issues but generally when I do 'npm i' i installs things and they work.

But the main point is that cargo is just amazing :)

P.S. Never used ruby.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Well there’s your problem lol.

Don’t use 2 for anything, it’s been “dead” for almost 4 years.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The problem is 2 and modules for 2 still tend to worm their way in somehow. I always use python3 -m pip because I never trust that "pip" alone is going to be python3 pip and I think that's what the people who have lots of trouble with pip aren't doing.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't think it's fair to blame pip for some ancient abandoned packages you tried to use.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Hmm, I personally haven't seen that kind of issue myself though. I also tend to not use random packages from random authors though, so that might help.

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So you are saying that npm is better than pip?? I'm not saying pip is good, but npm?

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (4 children)

npm has a lockfile which makes it infinitely better.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (6 children)

pip also has lock files

pip freeze > requirements.txt

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Would that just create a list of the current packages/versions without actually locking anything?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Would that just create a list of the current packages/versions

Yes, and all downstream dependencies

without actually locking anything?

What do you mean? Nothing stops someone from manually installing an npm package that differs from package-lock.json - this behaves the same. If you pip install -r requirements.txt it installs the exact versions specified by the package maintainer, just like npm install the only difference is python requires you to specify the "lock file" instead of implicitly reading one from the CWD

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago

npm is just plain up terrible. never worked for me first try without doing weird stuff

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

I don't know what cargo is, but npm is the second worst package manager I've ever used after nuget.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

cargo is the package manager for the Rust language

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've never had an issue with nuget, at least since dotnet core. My experience has it far ahead of npm and pip

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'll second this. I would argue that .Net Core's package/dependency management in general is way better than Python or JavaScript. Typically it just works and when it doesn't it's not too difficult to fix.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

NPM is ghastly though

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Memes like this make me ever more confused about my own software work flow. I'm in engineering so you can already guess my coding classes were pretty surface level at least at my uni and CC

Conda is what I like to use for data science but I still barely understand how to maintain a package manager. Im lowkey a bot when it comes to using non-GUI programs and tbh that paradigm shift has been hard after 18 years of no CLI usage.

The memes are pretty educational though

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Try not to learn too much from memes, they're mostly wrong. Conda is good, if you're looking for something more modern (for Python) I'd suggest Poetry

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is why I use poetry for python nowadays. Pip just feels like something ancient next to Cargo, Stack, Julia, npm, etc.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What about CPAN?

You can't even use it without the documentation of the program that you want to install because some dependencies have to be installed manually, and even then there's a chance of the installation not working because a unit test would fail.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What's so bad about pip? Imho, the venv thing is really nice

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (5 children)

vevn is not pip. The confusing set of different tools is part of the problem.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

cough npm,yarn,grunt,esbuild,webpack,parcel,rollup,lasso,rollup,etc.,etc.cough

I'm not saying that Python's packaging ecosystem isn't complicated, but to paint JavaScript as anything other than nightmare fuel just isn't right.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think that's a fair comparison, the only two libraries that are related to the actual packaging system in that list is yarn and NPM. The rest of them have to do with the complexities of actually having your code runnable in the maximum number of browsers without issue. If python was the browser scripting language, it'd likely have the same issue.

Is there a python package that transpiles and polyfills python3 to work in python 2? 2.7? 2.5?

Also, unrelated to your comment, a lot of people are dunking on npm for the black hole that is node modules (which is valid), but also saying it's not pip's fault a lot of packages don't work. It's not npm's fault the package maintainers are including all these dependencies, and there are some 0-dependency packages out there.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i will get hated for this but: cargo > composer > pip > npm

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

the only time i've had issues with pip is when using it to install the xonsh shell, but that's not really pip's fault since that's a very niche case and i wouldn't expect any language's package manager to handle installing something so fundamental anyways.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (21 children)

Bruh idk why the difference... Educate me?

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