On 25 Jan, 12:01, "Ben Sizer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Python is quite capable in many areas, such that the people in the > community with the expertise to extend the language and libraries, are > usually the ones who've been happily using the polished features for > years and have found they need nothing more. And the ones who need > those features probably got bored of waiting for progress long ago. You > get the responses you do from years of natural selection in the > community. I think that is why many of the SIGs are stagnant, why the > standard library has so much fluff yet still lacks in key areas such as > multimedia and web development, etc.
I think this is also a good insight into why things are as they are within the core development section of the community, although one can wonder what some people actively developing the language are actually doing with it if they are satisfied with the state of some of the standard library solutions. However, there are lots of factors which motivate people and the proliferation (or otherwise) of solutions to common problems: whether one develops one's own solutions as separate projects and/or tries to push for a consensus, whether one cares about other people using such solutions, whether one aspires to contributing to the standard library. Over the years, people have tended towards building their own communities around their projects rather than attempting to engage the wider Python community, and I think a motivation behind that has been the intractability of improving parts of the standard library. For example, how would one update the cgi module? Since lots of code including various Web frameworks makes use of the cgi module, it can't just go away or have its APIs changed radically, but this doesn't exactly make for a pretty "out of the box" solution for Web programming. Someone else was complaining recently about URL handling and the required combination of urllib, cgi and urlparse (or perhaps some other combination, depending on what one's needs are). Presented with the problem of rationalising all this, the chosen solution (as adopted by the Web-SIG) is, as it is frequently, to ignore the problem and to work on other things instead. > People can say, "if you want it done, why aren't you doing it?", and is > a fair question, but it doesn't alter the fact of Python's deficiencies > in certain areas when compared with other languages. True. It also doesn't address the issue of development priorities and their role in defining the platform's own standards. We all know that the Python language has issues (or "warts" as they are popularly called), although some of the most notable ones don't seem to have been addressed as yet in the plans for Python 3000 (eg. default argument evaluation), but some of the most awkward aspects of using Python involve libraries, not some deficiency of the language. However, reforming the standard library is a topic which has arisen in all seriousness only recently in the Python 3000 process (PEP 3108), and the scope of the related activity is highly restricted - it's almost an afterthought. Where the "why aren't you doing it?" part comes in involves the observation that even if someone is motivated enough to take something like this and to move forward in their own direction [1], unless such initiatives are embraced by the core developers they will remain peripheral, non-standard extensions that will at best only become mainstream much later on. I do wonder whether the interests of language/runtime project developers eventually become completely aligned with the needs of such projects, making things like "multimedia and web development" seem irrelevant, uninteresting or tangential. This has worrying implications for the perceived relevance of Python with regard to certain kinds of solutions, despite the wealth of independently produced libraries available for the language. Paul [1] http://wiki.python.org/moin/CodingProjectIdeas/StandardLibrary/RestructuredStandardLibrary -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
