[dcosson]

It's honestly terrible for newbies. If they try to use it, there's no pip included. So then they easy_install all their libraries which installs things into different places than most python devs will be used to. Or they easy_install pip first. But even still, everything is installing to system paths, so when they try to install things it fails with permission errors. They find a stack overflow post that says just "sudo" everything and they go to town. And there's no way to reset anything when it gets borked either because it's the system install.

Compare that to "brew install python". Now you have the most up to date version, with the right permissions for your user, that you can always brew uninstall and reinstall later if you need a different version or a clean install.

[adrianN]

So you're saying Apple should adopt brew as default package manager and install all system tools using brew? I could get behind that, but just dropping everything without replacement makes it harder for first-time programmers.

[Fnoord]

That, with analytics off by default. Also, Homebrew depends on Ruby, and Apple just ditched that

[wyclif]

you can always brew uninstall and reinstall later if you need a different version

That is the wrong way to do it. Just install pyenv/pipenv to manage different Python versions. It's dead simple to maintain system Python, Python 2.7x, and Python3.7.3 that way.

[dcosson]

Yes but I’ve never seen someone new to programming that bothered trying to figure out pyenv or similar. Even a lot of moderately experienced devs don’t bother with it. I guess it’s hard to realize the benefits of keeping environments organized until you’ve been burned by it.

[willio58]

Wrong way? I’ve used this method successfully for years.

[xapata]

Or conda, which I prefer to pipenv + pyenv.

[toyg]

Homebrew is not perfect though - it doesn't handle multi-versions (e.g. 3.7 and 3.8 running in parallel), which were working fine with Apple's Framework mechanism. Pyenv is superior in that respect (although it's fundamentally a hack). But I agree that brew does a better job for newbies than Apple's system python.