We need to enhance the standard library!

cym13 via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu Sep 8 07:15:45 PDT 2016


On Thursday, 8 September 2016 at 07:43:02 UTC, Jack Stouffer 
wrote:
> On Wednesday, 7 September 2016 at 19:01:23 UTC, Piotrek wrote:
>> Almost every "standard" evolves (e.g. USB, 3GPP, etc) and are 
>> subject to change in subsequent releases. Stopping the 
>> progress is not a case in good standardization process.
>
> When I say "a good candidate for standardization", what I mean 
> is a standardization of an API and module design, not a 
> standardization in the traditional sense.
>
> It doesn't matter that a standard like HTTP2 will have a new 
> version (e.g. 2.1), what matters is the way in which the 
> programmer interacts with it and how that API is designed. If 
> there's no clear answer, e.g. urllib2 vs. requests, then that 
> probably shouldn't be included in the standard library. 
> Continuing with the urllib2 example, how many people do you 
> suppose use urllib2 over requests, which is the most popular 
> Python library by far? Despite this, the Python team is stuck 
> maintaining urllib2.

Requests is a good example, but not for that reason. There were 
discussions to embed requests in Python's stdlib but the lead 
developer decided that it would slow down the process too much 
and decided to continue with it being a third-party library.

The thing is, even with Request maintaining urllib2 has hardly 
ever been considered an issue for Python. It is necessary as a 
foundation of other libraries including Request and that's what a 
standard library is for: providing tools fit for a large set of 
problems usable as building blocks.


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