After working with Java for over a year professionally, I really appreciate its dependency management system(Maven or Gradle). Whereas with Python it is always a mess(Poetry looks promising though).
I’m curious because this gets repeated a lot by many people. What specific messes do you get into?
I’m asking because my experience with python these days is always just doing “python -m venv .venv” activating it and then using “pip install -r requirements.txt”
To update dependencies I do “pip install —-upgrade dep” run tests and then go “pip freeze > requirements.txt” this never fails me. Though sometimes updating dependencies does make tests fail of cause, but that’s the fault of the individual packages not the packaging system. Even so I’d say even that is rare for me these days.
I know the might only work for 95% of the workflows out there, but I’m very curious as to what specific messes the last 5% end up struggling with and what makes people like you feel that it’s always a mess and not just “sometimes it gets messy” etc.
> After working with Java for over a year professionally, I really appreciate its dependency management system(Maven or Gradle).
Personally, it feels better in some ways and worse in others.
The whole pom.xml approach/format that Maven uses seems decent, all the way up to specifying which registries or mirrors you want to use (important if you have something like Nexus). Although publishing your own package needs additional configuration, which may mean putting credentials in text files, though thankfully this can be a temporary step in the CI pipeline.
That said, personally I almost prefer the node_modules approach to dependencies that Node uses (and I guess virtualenv to a degree), given that (at least usually) everything a particular project needs can easily be in a self-contained folder. The shared .m2 cache isn't a bad idea, it can just make cleaning it periodically/for particular projects kind of impossible, which is a shame.
I think one of the aspects that make dependencies better in JVM land is the fact that you oftentimes compile everything your app needs (perhaps without the JVM, though) into a .jar file or something similar, which can then be deployed. Personally, I think that that's one of the few good approaches, at least for business software, which is also why I like Go and .NET when similar deployments are possible. JVM already provides pretty much everything else you might need runtime-wise and you don't find yourself faffing about with system packages, like DB drivers.
That said, what I really dislike about the JVM ecosystem and frameworks like Spring, is the reliance on dynamic loading of classes and the huge amounts of reflection-related code that is put into apps. It's gotten to the point where even if your code has no warnings and actually compiles, it might still easily fail at runtime. Especially once you run into issues where dependencies have different versions of the same package that they need themselves, or alternatively your code doesn't run into the annotations/configuration that it needs.
Thankfully Spring Boot seems like a (decent) step forwards and helps you avoid some of the XML hell, but there is still definitely lots of historical baggage to deal with.
Personally, I like Python because of how easy it is to work with once things actually work and its relatively simplistic nature and rich ecosystem... but package management? I agree that it could definitely use some work. Then again, personally I just largely have stuck with the boring setup of something like pip/virtualenv inside of containers, or whatever is the most popular/widespread at any given moment.
Of course, Python is no exception here, trying to work with old Ruby or Node projects also sometimes has issues with getting things up and running. Personally I feel that the more dependencies you have, the harder it will be to keep your application up and running, and later update it (for example, even in regards to front end, consider React + lots of additional libraries vs something like Angular which has more functionality out of the box, even if more tightly coupled).
This. All the big static generators in the market are kinda of generic enough that they demand upfront investment from you. Whether its Jekyll, Hugo or any big shot you have to fit a lot of things according to them. My personal website is built by Jekyll, but I finding a lot harder to make changes because I am not comfortable with a Ruby tooling( Once, I had to debug an obscure Ruby related bug in M1 Mac). I am comfortable with Python though( I have considerable proficiency and good documentation) which then I will use it for my own static generator.
I guess writing your own non-generic own-static generator should be relatively easy and worth the effort as you wouldn't have to read some obscure documentation (like Jekyll).
