I’m going to code in Python for my job soon, do you have links on how TF I should manage dependencies? I can’t stand the bloat of virtual environments or Anaconda sorry.
I need to make myself a stack python but I don’t want to look at this madness. At least Typescript benefits from a high quality ecosystem of frontend tooling with Vite/React/ESLint/ESBuild and it’s getting even better with the new runtimes features :)
I need to learn about:
- built-in tools provided by the language (practice on the job and the power of Google & LLMs will help)
- ecosystem
- good practices
Why is their a build system for an interpreted language ? Do you have bundling concerns like in JS or you somehow compile Python code now?
uv
Everything else feels 4 to 15 years behind.
You need to get over the bloat of virtual environments. It’s the same as node_modules and it’s completely necessary if you want more than a single python project to live on your machine.
I personally use poetry as my dependency manager and build tool. It’s not perfect but it’s a lot better than pipenv or just rawdogging pip like a maniac. uv is the new hotness, but I haven’t tried it so can’t vouch. People seem to like it though.
JavaScript is also an interpreted language with tons of build tools. The reason to have one for python is mainly about packaging and code distribution, so same as JavaScript. If you want to distribute a program you probably don’t want to just point people to a GitHub repo, and if you want to publish a package on pypi it needs to be bundled correctly.
For ecosystem there isn’t much I can do for you, it completely depends on what you’ll be working on. Baseline you want
pydanticfor parsing objects, assuming some APIs will be involved. You wantblackfor code formatting,flake8for linting,pytestfor testing. If you’re gonna write your own APIs you can’t go wrong withfastapi, which works great with pydantic. For nice console stuff there’sclickfor building cli apps andrichandtextualfor console output and live console apps respectively.People are actively trying to replace flake8 and black with feature compatible stuff written in rust but again I haven’t tried those so can’t vouch.
Coming from react you’re gonna need to pretty quickly switch gears to thinking more object oriented. You’re gonna be annoyed at how you can’t just quickly declare a deeply nested interface, that’s just how it is. The biggest change other than object oriented thinking will probably be decorators. Typescript had them experimentally and only for classes, python has them for classes and functions natively. They’re a bit tricky to wrap your mind around when you want to write your own, but not too bad. A lot of Google hits will be outdated on this front. Google specifically “decorators ParamSpec” to see how to make them properly.
Good luck in your new job, you’ll be grand!
