You don't find the environment to be fragile because millions of human hours have been spent fixing those problems or working around them.
Which is significantly more than was needed for different technologies to achieve similar results.
Re:The lost cause of the Lisp machines
by mr_toad on Thursday November 20, 2025 @09:09AM
(#45992717)
But people start by hacking away with one-off installs written for their specific environments, get it to the point where it’s useful to others, and then expect others to install all the tools and dependencies needed to install it.
Quick start guide: works on my machine.
Re:The lost cause of the Lisp machines
by throwaway81523 on Friday November 21, 2025 @12:36AM
(#46001557)
It seems the other way to me, maintaining environment consistency is such a pain that even a 5 line Python script ends up getting packaged in its own Docker container.
Where I see Python used is in places where you do not need it packaged as executables:
1. Linux - where the package manager solves the problem. I use multiple GUI apps written in python
2. On servers - e.g. Django web apps, where the the environment is set up per application
3. Code written for specific environments - even for specific hardware
4. One off installs - again, you have a specified target environment.
In none of the above cases do I find the environment to be fragile. On the other hand, if you are trying to distribute a Windows app to a large number of users I would expect it to be problematic.