TL;DR : Python tooling has been a fragmented, slow mess for years. The revolution didn't come from within the ecosystem: it came from Rust. uv, Ruff and ty — all written in Rust by Astral — have replaced half a dozen tools and are between 10x and 100x faster. Looks like the Cult of Ferris had a point after all. Have you ever tried to explain to someone how to install dependencies in Python? "Use pip. Well, but inside a virtualenv . Or venv , which is the new thing. Though if you have multiple Python versions, you need pyenv . And for project management, use poetry . Or pipenv . Or pdm . Or conda if you do data science. Oh, and the lock file is generated by each tool in a different format. And don't forget setup.py . Well, now it's pyproject.toml . Well, sometimes both." If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. Randall Munroe dedicated an xkcd strip to it in 2018 — a spaghetti diagram showing all the ways Python can be installed on your machine. Eight years later, the comic is still relevant.…