I don't think assuming the European commission will act rationally or stably on this is really a good idea, and I say that as a European...

Not if they're GPL licensed you can't. And that's a headache most commercial people do not want at all when trying to write software that's often for a marginal part of their audience anyway.

I think this is true in some things and less true in others.

It's a pretty high moat getting into stuff like simulation software because the people working on numerical methods overwhelmingly have PhDs and it's a mixed skill set. Domain expertise here requires you to know maths to a high level. Even mechanical engineers often struggle here; it's often applied mathematicians and physicists turned devs that work on this stuff.

I worked on a fairly gnarly signal processing thing a while back that required bringing together knowledge of physics and software and maths and I found explaining it to people was tricky as their eyes glazed over at some point because their knowledge typically only covered one part of those.

I still couldn’t get it to do more advanced stuff.

There's not that much depth in a lot of 'everyday' writing. For many tasks that means that you don't need to be hyperintelligent - reading a recipe or a shopping list, reading a newspaper article, etc.

Edit: I should say, topic conceptual based books I mean here. Something like 'Designing Data Intensive Pipelines', not 'Learn Python' which is out of date before it's even published

Yes but Rust has a lot more availability of libraries to do stuff as a result. Want to do anything ML or scientific? You at least have a route in Rust where you don’t with Go.

So I suggested it, got a PR up (bit painful) it got reviewed, went in, everything worked fine, and we came about a week towards releasing the product (6 monthly releases) before someone noticed that we couldn’t load files from previous versions. Turned out that we wrote lots of these old Bool types to binary data files and so the 4 byte data was now being read as 1 byte data. Oops. Reverted the whole lot. Lesson in humility!

Want to install PyTorch? which one? CUDA? Oh, OK, then you have to get the wheel directly from them because there are 6 different versions for differnet CUDA versions, and the wheels are too large for PyPi anyway.

Conda offers only a partial resolution to this problem. Spack is great at being ultra configurable and having all the C/C++/Fortran dependencies and compiler toolchains you need, and so allowing ekeing out best performance, but doesn't integrate well with uv etc. so it's difficult to take an experimental ML project written by a researcher and take it through to productionisation with it.

Try and write a signal processing thing with filters, windowing, overlap, etc. - there's no easy way to do it at all with the libraries that exist.