While the Python ecosystem trends towards a similar state as the JS ecosystem, at least no one yet needs to have any ideas about "tree shaking" and hype that as some kind of "new idea". When one needs to "shake out" code, because it has become too much, one should really think about not getting that code in there in the first place.
In the Python ecosystem some of the tooling does not exist, because it is not needed. Usually Python code is not shipped over network each time a website is called. Hopefully people keep dependencies of projects to a minimum, avoiding to have to fix their mistakes later by shaking out stuff. Python has an OK-ish module system, not great, but OK, compared to how JS started out. There is no need for 6-10 standards competing and requiring different "build tools" to make one huge cluster f of uglified code out of all the code of an application. Mind, it is 2023 and we still have no good way to tell the TypeScript compiler to simply spit out JavaScript code, that can immediately be served on a website, if the TS code has multiple modules. The JS ecosystem still suffers a lot from the not well thought through basis of the language and historical burden of that.
Python is far from perfect itself of course. Plenty of problems in its ecosystem as well.
Yeah, I get the impression some believe they're comparing apples with apples because they're both interpreted languages, but we don't exactly send Python scripts to millions of arbitrary clients, all of which execute them immediately.
Plausible but not sure it's entirely relevant. Most libs have parts that aren't used all the time. A lib that has no redundant parts is either a gem or a minuscule thing that will create a lot of miniscule deps.
> While the Python ecosystem trends towards a similar state as the JS ecosystem, at least no one yet needs to have any ideas about "tree shaking" and hype
I agree with your sentiment entirely about "When [...] it has become too much, one should really think about not getting that code in there in the first place," but that's really a problem with the NPM community in particular—not something that people who aren't NPM programmers can do anything about (and who, as people who work with JS, are even more annoyed by it than people hailing from communities that use other languages).
> Mind, it is 2023 and we still have no good way to tell the TypeScript compiler to simply spit out JavaScript code, that can immediately be served on a website
I guess it's actually necessary to point out the obvious here: TypeScript is not JS. The fact that TypeScript superficially resembles JS does not make the sins of the TypeScript team JS's responsibility. You could swap "TypeScript" for, say, FartTwist, an imaginary programming language that I just made up and doesn't resemble JS (or anything else that transpiles to JS with tools that have the same problem the TypeScript ones have), and the criticism would be exactly as applicable.
The big problem with the JS ecosystem is that it's filled with people who clearly don't like programming in JS, and yet they advertise themselves as part of that milieu. In fact, enough of them have banded together that they've managed to almost completely commandeer JS's public image, to the point that when JS is mentioned what comes to mind are their shenanigans, inevitably leading to discussions like this one.
> Hopefully people keep dependencies of projects to a minimum
This is not my experience of Python. Some of the tools I’ve installed via Homebrew have whole forests of dependencies. And don’t get me started on all the different Python versions they require.
