Python has done an impressive job over the years of making steady robust improvements. The typing and tooling has just gotten better and better. There are still plenty of problems though, imho async is still a much bigger pain than it should be (compared to other runtimes with a very nice experience like go or elixir, even dotnet has been less pain in my experience). Overall I like python, but it mainly boils down to the robust libraries for things I do (ML, Data munching/analysis)
I don't know what I am doing wrong but nothing written in Python has ever worked for me.
I download the .py repo from from github or wherever and try to run it - errors.
I try to install missing libraries pip this and that - errors.
I battle fixing endless error with dependencies and when the .py finally runs - errors - wrong version of whatever library or wrong patch of this or that or the "production ready" .py does not work correctly on Windows or single file script uses excel library that has changed in incompatible ways 3 times in 2 years.
I Download all the files from the flashy looking web site and follow all the instructions to the letter - errors.
Python is anything but "robust".
It is the most fragile environment in the universe, worse than c, c++ and javascript put togeter, at least this is my experience with it.
That’s wild. The last time I had that experience with Python must have been more than 10 years ago. I’ll admit a decade ago you definitely did need to know way to many details about way too many tools from virtualenvs to setuotools to wheels, etc. to get things working from somebody else’s project, but imho, poetry and uv have really changed all that.
This is exactly my experience too. I avoid python software like the plague, because even when it does work, I can not rely on it continuing to work when python gets updated on my system.
You cant really make a judgement on python from this, as your story just screams user error. I have never encountered anything of what you say, and I have been programming in Python from before I had any clue what I did.
My own experience could hardly be more different. For that matter, I have never had to even look at a "flashy looking web site and follow all the instructions to the letter" in order to install something.
For example, to install yt-dlp, I followed these steps:
sudo apt install pipx
pipx install yt-dlp
Actually, only the second one, because I already had pipx (https://pipx.pypa.io/ — a wrapper for pip that does basic virtual environment management) installed.
Can you name some specific things in Python you have tried to use, and give more concrete descriptions of how you tried to set them up?
It's quite crazy, as Python first version was in 1991, 4 years before Java. It's a language with a ton of legacy baggage, the 2/3 transition, the BDLF being replaced by a completely different project leadership system, and it still keeps going strong.
This interview from Brett Cannon (old core dev who worked on packaging, imports, the vscode python extension...) is eye opening:
The guy cares SO MUCH and they have so many things not to break you can feel the sense of passion and the weight of responsibility in everything he says.
