alt Hacker NewsI largely agree but don't want to entirely discount the effect that using a compiled language had.
At least in my limited experience, the selling point with the most traction is that you don't already need a working python install to get UV. And once you have UV, you can just go!
If I had a dollar for every time I've helped somebody untangle the mess of python environment libraries created by an undocumented mix of python delivered through the distributions package management versus native pip versus manually installed...
At least on paper, both poetry and UV have a pretty similar feature set. You do however need a working python environment to install and use poetry though.
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So basically, it avoids the whole chicken-and-egg problem. With UV you've simply always got "UV -> project Python 1.23 -> project". UV is your dependency manager, and your Python is just another dependency.
With other dependency managers you end up with "system Python 3.45 -> dep manager -> project Python 1.23 -> project". Or worse, "system Python 1.23 -> dep manager -> project Python 1.23 -> project". And of course there will be people who read about the problem and install their own Python manager, so they end up with a "system Python -> virtualenv Python -> poetry Python -> project" stack. Or the other way around, and they'll end up installing their project dependencies globally...
1000% this. uv is trivially installable and is completely unrelated to installations of python.
> the selling point with the most traction is that you don't already need a working python install to get UV. And once you have UV, you can just go!
I still genuinely do not understand why this is a serious selling point. Linux systems commonly already provide (and heavily depend upon) a Python distribution which is perfectly suitable for creating virtual environments, and Python on Windows is provided by a traditional installer following the usual idioms for Windows end users. (To install uv on Windows I would be expected to use the PowerShell equivalent of a curl | sh trick; many people trying to learn to use Python on Windows have to be taught what cmd.exe is, never mind PowerShell.) If anything, new Python-on-Windows users are getting tripped up by the moving target of attempts to make it even easier (in part because of things Microsoft messed up when trying to coordinate with the CPython team; see for example https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58754860/cmd-opens-windo... when it originally happened in Python 3.7).
> If I had a dollar for every time I've helped somebody untangle the mess of python environment libraries created by an undocumented mix of python delivered through the distributions package management versus native pip versus manually installed...
Sure, but that has everything to do with not understanding (or caring about) virtual environments (which are fundamental, and used by uv under the hood because there is really no viable alternative), and nothing to do with getting Python in the first place. I also don't know what you mean about "native pip" here; it seems like you're conflating the Python installation process with the package installation process.