I don't write Python code for my work. Last weekend I came across an interesting Jupiter notebook and figured I'd give it a try on my work laptop. "It's probably as easy as brew install pip and then use that to load the other dependencies," I assumed.
Over an hour later I had to give up. There was initially some kind of Python version conflict on my Mac. Eventually some version of JupyterLab was installed somewhere, but it couldn't find any dependencies for the notebook. As a complete newbie to the Python ecosystem, I googled for instructions and found various environment managers, which then failed possibly because something is incompatible with Big Sur. More googling revealed instructions with complex CFLAGS environment setups to fix it, which didn't — and at that point it was very far from the supposed convenience of scripting languages anyway.
I don't think it's Python's fault. Probably all the programming toolchains are this hard to a newbie! But it was a humbling experience after 34 years of programming, not being able to load a piece of sample code in a Sunday afternoon.
Over an hour later I had to give up. There was initially some kind of Python version conflict on my Mac. Eventually some version of JupyterLab was installed somewhere, but it couldn't find any dependencies for the notebook. As a complete newbie to the Python ecosystem, I googled for instructions and found various environment managers, which then failed possibly because something is incompatible with Big Sur. More googling revealed instructions with complex CFLAGS environment setups to fix it, which didn't — and at that point it was very far from the supposed convenience of scripting languages anyway.
I don't think it's Python's fault. Probably all the programming toolchains are this hard to a newbie! But it was a humbling experience after 34 years of programming, not being able to load a piece of sample code in a Sunday afternoon.