this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
555 points (89.4% liked)
Programmer Humor
27490 readers
1557 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If you're writing python code you have to deal with versioning, yeah. But the end user basically never has to care.
Except if they then have to run it on their machine and the setup instructions start with setting up a venv. I find that a lot of Python software in the ML realm makes no effort to isolate the end user from the complexities of the platform. At best you get a setup script that may or may not create a working venv without manual intervention, usually the latter. It might be more of a Torch issue than a Python one but it still means spending a lot of time messing with the Python environment to get things running.
This may color my perception but the parts of the Python ecosystem I get exposed to as an end user these days feel very hacky. (Not all of it is, though; I remember from my Gentoo days that Portage was rock solid.)
Figuring out venvs was a bit frustrating for me. Particularly since the steps I was following to install a particular app mentioned nothing about them, so I just got an error when I tried to follow their instructions. Thankfully managed to get it figured out, but yeah, definitely wouldn’t have been my first choice for an install method if others were available for that app.
There are reasons why Common Lisp (that I absolutely prefer as well) is still a big thing in AI-related applications. Some of those are listed in your comment.
Security issues aside, you can freeze python code to an executable, linux, mac, windows.
Kind of neat IMO. Except the security concerns ofc.
ML is a very new field and so most programs are not mature, and indeed they can have you messing around with venvs and such.
But most python software people actually used is packaged by a distro already.
ML has been there since the 1950s. What is an old field for you?
🙄
qWhile true, we are not using the same tools as we did in the 50s. Especially with the very quickly evolving situation of today, half measures and hacks are normal.
if they do that's not release ready software that you should concern yourself with imo. that's a problem of project maturity not runtime choice