alt Hacker NewsI thought that too, but I think the tricky bit is if you're a non-python user, this isn't yet obvious.
If you've never used Clojure and start a Clojure project, you will almost definitely find advice telling you to use Leiningen.
For Python, if you search online you might find someone saying to use uv, but also potentially venv, poetry or hatch. I definitely think uv is taking over, but its not yet ubiquitous.
Ironically, I actually had a similar thing installing Go the other day. I'd never used Go before, and installed it using apt only to find that version was too old and I'd done it wrong.
Although in that case, it was a much quicker resolution than I think anyone fighting with virtual environments would have.
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There's definitely a philosophical shift that you can observe happening over the last 12-15 years or so, where at the start you have the interpreter as the centre of the world and at the end there's an ecosystem management tool that you use to give yourself an interpreter (and virtual environments, and so on) per project.
I think this properly kicked off with RVM, which needed to come into existence because you had this situation where the Ruby interpreter was going through incompatible changes, the versions on popular distributions were lagging, and Rails, the main reason people were turning to Ruby, was relatively militant about which interpreter versions it would support. Also, building the interpreter such that it would successfully run Rails wasn't trivial. Not that hard, but enough that a convenience wrapper mattered. So you had a whole generation of web devs coming up in an environment where the core language wasn't the first touchpoint, and there wasn't an assumption that you could (or should) rely on what you could apt-get install on the base OS.
This is broadly an extremely good thing.
But the critical thing that RVM did was that it broke the circular dependency at the core of the problem: it didn't itself depend on having a working ruby interpreter. Prior to that you could observe a sort of sniffiness about tools for a language which weren't implemented in that language, but RVM solved enough of the pain that it barged straight past that.
Then you had similar tools popping up in other languages - nvm and leiningen are the first that spring to mind, but I'd also throw (for instance) asdf into the mix here - where the executable that you call to set up your environment has a '#!/bin/bash' shebang line.
Go has sidestepped most of this because of three things: 1) rigorous backwards compatibility; 2) the simplest possible installation onramp; 3) being timed with the above timeline so that having a pre-existing `go` binary provided by your OS is unlikely unless you install it yourself. And none of those are true of Python. The backwards compatibility breaks in this period are legendary, you almost always do have a pre-existing Python to confuse things, and installing a new python without breaking that pre-existing Python, which your OS itself depends on, is a risk. Add to that the sniffiness I mentioned (which you can still see today on `uv` threads) and you've got a situation where Python is catching up to what other languages managed a decade ago.
Again.
> you might find someone saying to use uv, but also potentially venv, poetry or hatch.
This is sort of like saying "You might find someone saying to drive a Ford, but also potentially internal combustion engine, Nissan or Hyundai".
Do you think a non-python user would piece it together if the shebang line reveals what tool to use?
> If you've never used Clojure and start a Clojure project, you will almost definitely find advice telling you to use Leiningen.
I thought the current best practice for Clojure was to use the shiny new built-in tooling? deps.edn or something like that?
uv has been around for less than two years. It’s on track to become the default choice, it’s just a matter of time.
That's my experience. I'm not a Python developer, and installing Python programs has been a mess for decades, so I'd rather stay away from the language than try another new tool.
Over the years, I've used setup.py, pip, pipenv (which kept crashing though it was an official recommendation), manual venv+pip (or virtualenv? I vaguely remember there were 2 similar tools and none was part of a minimal Python install). Does uv work in all of these cases? The uv doc pointed out by the GP is vague about legacy projects, though I've just skimmed through the long page.
IIRC, Python tools didn't share their data across projects, so they could build the same heavy dependencies multiple times. I've also seen projects with incomplete dependencies (installed through Conda, IIRC) which were a major pain to get working. For many years, the only simple and sane way to run some Python code was in a Docker image, which has its own drawbacks.