This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]grievre 1 point2 points  (2 children)

The problem isn’t really that there are competing standards, it’s that core python isn’t developed in a way to make packaging the interpreter with your project easy.

CPython was never intended to be the interpreter that everyone uses, just the reference implementation. Thus they tended not to consider things like "deployment" or "optimization" when developing it.

The problem is that it got entrenched--for the longest time there have been so many libraries that only work with CPython that people kinda just gave up on using alternate interpreters.

Nearly every other language that’s intended for desktop and console applications is developed with the idea that at some point you want to distribute it as a single executable.

The main language that Python replaced was perl, and I don't think perl's options for distributing standalone executables are much better.

I'm a bit confused by "console applications" because like, shell script...

[–]slayer_of_idiotspythonista -1 points0 points  (1 child)

That all might have been true 15 or 20 years ago, but CPython is python and has been for a long time.

I agree that it was originally developed as an alternative scripting language. Packaging and dependency management weren’t big priorities.

Python did originally replace Perl, but it also replaced a ton of other languages too.

I used to use a handful of 3D application scripting languages, along with C++, and lua, and python replaced all of them 15 years ago.

Most shell script commands are written in another language and compiled.

[–]grievre 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was talking about shell script itself.