A very poetic Python 🐍

I have been using Python for all sorts of things in the past years. Data science, music, scripting, automation, puzzle solving, web UI apps, serverless apps and more. Yet throughout all this time I've constantly changed the ways in which I setup Python itself, virtual environments for my projects, package managers and all the peripherals of the POSIX world. ⊕ Aliases, environment variables, shell scripts, dotfiles etc. Also, here's a nice article about what POSIX is.

Throughout my adventures in Python I've been blessed ⊕ Unfounded opinion based on observing conversations around the Python community, stale 10-year old Python answers on StackOverflow, a countdown timer to Python2.7 end-of-life and more. to have never used a pre-Python3 version. Today I'm writing this post through a macOS device for which Apple has decided to drop support for Python2.7 ⊕ I will actually update to macOS 12.3 Monterey through the writing of this post. 🤷‍♂️🤞 by not including any version of Python at all, ⊕ It used to be installed by default in macOS under /usr/bin/python which was symlinked to the relevant binary under /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/ effectively giving the user full control over how they wish to install Python.

And so it begins

Starting off with a test, I wanted to see if there is a python command left in my terminal and to my surprise there was. Seems like a symbolic link was left behind in /usr/local/bin/python, pointing to /usr/bin/python3. What was really odd though is that when I ran python I got a prompt from the system ⊕ telling me that I need to install the command line developer tools in order to run python. I'm like whaaa? okay install I guess? 🤷‍♂️

To nobody's surprise this did absolutely nothing. A short investigation led me to not much more than suspicion that brew or some other little hack I had to do resulted in that symbolic link ⊕ /usr/local/bin/python -> /usr/bin/python3 and deleting it ⊕ rm /usr/local/bin/python
Also did a brew cleanup just in case, but I got nothing relevant to report. didn't seem to affect my system, so hurray!

Now, of course you noticed that there is already a Python version installed in my system. That is because well I only updated my device to macOS 12.3 ⊕ Actually 12.3.1 as I'm writing this. Yes, I had time to update my device but not to finish this blog post and the process of reinstalling Python. Thanks for noticing. ❤️ . I didn't get a fresh new OS install or device for that matter. Essentially, this means that my system will still have most of whatever dependencies it had before the update. Now, of course I could go on and completely purge Python for real ⊕ As in brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies python but that would introduce more trouble than I'm willing to go through, I hope you understand.

Testing one last thing before we continue, I recreated the symbolic link that we saw existed before and it seems to be triggering the same command line developer tools prompt. Maybe something to report to Apple? Smells like a hardcoded thing to me.

Work in progress! Come back for more later ❤️

Update 1

I managed to upgrade to 12.3 just fine, but I have yet to purge my Python setup.

Update 2

I finally got some time to continue, now I have purged most Python versions and their peripherals from my system. Almost fresh start! Almost too fresh, while deleting things I accidentally ran rm -rf ~/Library/ instead of rm -rf ~/Library/Python. I realized it early and cancelled it but I have no way to know if I deleted anything crucial... A restart will tell.

Update 3

I managed to get some more progress on this post! 🥳
To be frank, I am using this post to document my progress in this task in real-time, but my procrastination brain enjoys getting distracted with other improvements on this personal blog.
Two birds with one stone you could argue!
Only if the stone was thrown from the surface of the moon and the birds are sitting on a tree on Earth.
Ah well, stay tuned! 👾