Python package management / installation is famously difficult… or so the story goes. This keeps getting reinforced by forum comments, quoting that one xkcd page, and people who aren’t actually running into the issues repeating the meme. In practice, it will take just a few minutes to understand and not end up in a mess.
Source: Python dependency management difficulty is an unhelpful meme, an article by Stanisław Pitucha.
Carta made the mypy type checker an option for individual teams in 2018, but the burdensome manual work of adding missing type annotations meant that few adopted it. Mypy would have generated an unmanageable number of errors if we had required it universally.
Carta’s infrastructure team saw this as an opportunity to improve the quality of life for our engineers and enhance our overall code quality and ownership. We built an automated refactoring framework to add those missing types, particularly useful for repaying tech debt in a large codebase. We estimate that it has saved over four years of manual work and greatly helped engineers focus on product development.
Source: Type annotation via automated refactoring, an article by Jimmy Lai.
Recently on the Swift Forums, someone complained that putting Swift in the OS has only made things worse for developers. My immediate reaction is a snarky “welcome to the world of libraries shipped with the OS”, but that’s not helpful and also doesn’t refute their point. So here’s a blog post that talks about how we got where we did, covering time when I worked on Swift at Apple. But I’m going to have to start a lot earlier to explain the problem…
Source: Swift was always going to be part of the OS, an article by Jordan Rose.