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To be honest, Python made it stupendously simpler than anything else because it has a great standard library. The only dependency (click) is rock solid and made it a lot simpler to handle commands independently, but we could probably do without it and just use the built-in argparse—-but at the expense of a few more lines of code I didn’t want to maintain.

Also, Python is everywhere, on every OS and Linux system, so it was a natural choice. I also wanted it to be easily hackable and extensible, and few languages would make it simpler to understand or extend.




That’s pretty funny. You may want to look a little further field to discover that the machines with Python are far from “all the machines” out there. Particularly production servers, which, if they run responsibly, are hardened with every extraneous bit of software removed.


I developed security software in Python that ran on 100k+ production nodes covering dozens of operating systems. They all had Python.


Counter-anecdote: none of my Linux PCs have python.


Debian comes prepackaged with Python. If there are distros that are good enough for a server almost out of the box, surely Debian stable is one.


Not sure who's to "blame", but I was super surprised a few days ago when I installed Kubuntu 24.04 (minimal), and Python was missing. Was fine though as I strictly use via pipx and miniconda only, but still surprising.


Counter-counter-anecdote: my toaster has python.


I am sorry for your toaster.


I used to run Python 2 on OpenVMS in production. Python can have a pretty wide footprint if one looks around.




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