Why was awscli written in python? Bad decision to begin with. Hey! We have a pro...

mdaniel · 2025-09-03T02:52:41 1756867961

I guess at least they're consistent (or maybe herd mentality) since both azure-cli and gcloud are both in python, too

mdaniel · 2025-09-03T03:06:50 1756868810

but, hey, at least they get to be ultimately dynamic, leading to horeshit like this https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/blob/2.28.22/awscli/botocore/...

What does `create_client` return?! don't you worry your pretty head about it, it'll be whatever you want it to be! flexability!!11

fzzzy · 2025-09-02T22:55:46 1756853746

Doesn’t have Unicode? What the heck?

mdaniel · 2025-09-03T03:04:13 1756868653

I believe they're discussing that awscli was targeting Python 2.x for the longest time, e.g. https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/blob/0.4.1/setup.py#L48 up through https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/blob/1.19.112/setup.py#L64 from 4 years ago, seemingly cutting over to Py3-only starting with https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/blob/1.20.0/setup.py#L62

I didn't go digging into it, but I'd guess they used the ubiquitous "six" library for backporting unicode functionality, but the point is likely "but why start underwater?!"