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piles Python environment jank on top of Ubuntu/Darwin jank, and piles Docker jank on top of the previous, and piles Docker Compose jank on the previous, until you finally arrive at Jank-As-A-Service

Don’t demand your language do the job of the operating system and come with a package manager. Your distro has packages that are guaranteed to play well together, use them.

I use a number of operating systems/distributions/package managers, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Most can more or less build most stuff in a way that you can run infrastructure on as long as you're not in a nasty cross-platform setting (MacOS development and Linux deployment comes to mind).

Off the top of my head I can't think of any language other than Python that manages to be a constant and persistent cavalcade of self-inflicted environment and dependency chemical fires on absolutely every single one of them. Pointing this out usually generates a bunch of "pipenv/poetry/uv/whatever works fine for me", and for those folks I am very happy that they don't deal with heavily native extension-backed requirements. Mazel tov.

It's a meme: https://xkcd.com/1987/

Pointing this out usually generates a bunch of "pipenv/poetry/uv/whatever works fine for me",

I had to use bundler (Ruby) and got some non-descript “missing dev dependencies”. After installing “dev dependencies” (?) for my Linux distro it still didn’t work. The first StackOverflow answer (for Windows) had over a dozen answers with “this worked for me on macOS”. No logic to it, just a random of assortment of commands that happened to work.

At that point I decided to use devbox. And give up if that didn’t work (but it did).

Your distro has packages that are guaranteed to play well together…

I’ve never worked in an org that had all machines 100% unified on a single distro from dev to prod.

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