[mgunyho]

Indeed, Python would be a good language to implement this in terms of ease of development, but it's very difficult to distribute a standalone binary (which I wanted to do). The built-in curses support of Python is also not cross-platform I think.

[chrismorgan]

It’s a funny thing I’ve noticed about scripting languages: they’re generally easier to get going with yourself, but they’re horrible for distribution/deployment, and if you have to integrate code written in other languages (even C libraries with Python bindings, or similar—things like wxWidgets or GTK), that rapidly escalates to a nightmare. Meanwhile, ahead-of-time compiled languages like Rust and Go are simply a breeze to distribute/deploy.

[mgunyho]

That's true, although I think in the case of Go, it is a central design decision to make single-binaries easy so it's more of an exception to the rule.

I don't think it's an inherent feature of scripting languages that they are hard to distribute. I'm pretty sure it's possible to package up a tiny Lua interpreter (or e.g. QuickJS) and all necessary scripts into a standalone file.

[mixmastamyk]

There are several working options for packaging Python apps, some existing for twenty years. Sure, while a little more complicated than compiling a static executable, it is hardly a "nightmare." It's basically writing a config file, and adding another stanza to a Makefile or modern equivalent.

Reminds me of the idea regularly pushed here that you need a virtualenv even for thirty-line scripts. I read these kind of takes here often and am a bit baffled by them. Maybe it is because developers have lost administrator skills over time, that this feels like an insurmountable challenge?

[nibbleshifter]

Standalone Python apps as binaries tend to be poorly performant, and huge (due to shipping an interpreter, stdlib, deps, etc) in my experience.

Assuming you get it working at all.

[jonnycomputer]

I'd prefer an informative rebuttal if people disagree with nibbleshifter, because I want to learn.