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“Python's batteries are leaking”

pyfound.blogspot.com

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Re: “Python's batteries are leaking”

#21

Post by jMyles »

Guido is a good dude, through-and-through, despite his perhaps bad behavior here.

Amber is nothing short of an open source hero, having brought Twisted, one of the best open source projects in the world, to new heights. Her insights are as important as anyone in the python community, and after six consecutive PyCons sprinting at the Twisted table (including literally in a chair with Amber to my left and Glyph to my right earlier this month), I consider Amber's voice to be one of the truest and clearest among the leadership of the language into the future.

Amber and Guido are both beautiful human beings.

In the dispute that is the topic of this blog post, Amber is basically totally right. Moreover, the distinction has less to do with any kind of nagging python 2 holdover than this article suggests. The standard lib's role as a place where code goes to die is a view that is widely held and accurate for many cases.

The following question went unanswered during the Steering Council Q&A:

"Every feature request has a constituency of people who want it. Is there a constituency for conservatism and minimalism?"

...and that's really what this whole thing is about.

Re: “Python's batteries are leaking”

#22

Post by nerdwaller »

> She thinks that some bugs in the standard library will never be fixed.

This is actually an interesting paradox to be in, and one that Linus Torvalds recently commented on. His focus, like Guido’s, is the user and even fixing a bug can break the user.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/8/3/621

Re: “Python's batteries are leaking”

#23

Post by jteppinette »

tptacek wrote: post #18
kentm wrote: post #15

I was rather shocked to find that python didn’t have a full-featured crypto library included in its standard lib. The alternatives all ended up being unmaintained or maintained by small groups (which makes trust in the soundness difficult). I tapped our security team, who were in disbelief, but ultimately they gave up to and I wrote the software in go instead.

You want pyca/cryptography. The last thing in the world you want is a standard crypto library that no experts are enthusiastic about maintaining. Golang had an unfair advantage here, because the language team included cryptography engineers. It would be weird if most languages had the same kind of crypto in their stdlibs. I think there is in general nothing wrong with a language ecosystem where key parts of the whole…

When you find a coworker trying to use this module..

> cryptography/src/cryptography/hazmat/__init__.py

  Hazardous Materials
  This is a "Hazardous Materials" module. You should ONLY use it if you're
  100% absolutely sure that you know what you're doing because this module
  is full of land mines, dragons, and dinosaurs with laser guns.

Re: “Python's batteries are leaking”

#24

Post by resoluteteeth »

new4thaccount wrote: post #20
resoluteteeth wrote: post #9

When I first used python like 20 years ago I was blown away by how much functionality was blown in, and it can be annoying using languages where even the most basic functionality involves downloading 50 packages from the internet, but on the other hand the standard library does seem to be a mess now.

Yea. I'm using Rust at the moment for fun and the amount of things not in the standard library is crazy to me. What? There is no built-in dictionary? What do I use instead and where is it? Edit: based off of all the replies below, everyone understands the validity of what I'm trying to say, but also have fortunately pointed out my admittedly grevious error of not knowing you can just import hashmap from stdlib. The e…

Yeah Rust is pretty extreme. I was just trying to generate a random number in it and was pretty surprised to find out that at some point it did have this functionality in the standard library but they actually removed it and now it's a separate crate.

Re: “Python's batteries are leaking”

#25

Post by jzoch »

new4thaccount wrote: post #20
resoluteteeth wrote: post #9

When I first used python like 20 years ago I was blown away by how much functionality was blown in, and it can be annoying using languages where even the most basic functionality involves downloading 50 packages from the internet, but on the other hand the standard library does seem to be a mess now.

Yea. I'm using Rust at the moment for fun and the amount of things not in the standard library is crazy to me. What? There is no built-in dictionary? What do I use instead and where is it? Edit: based off of all the replies below, everyone understands the validity of what I'm trying to say, but also have fortunately pointed out my admittedly grevious error of not knowing you can just import hashmap from stdlib. The e…

You mean a map? It's in the standard library.

Re: “Python's batteries are leaking”

#26

Post by HippoBaro »

jteppinette wrote: post #16

IMO, Golang does the best job of maintaining a high quality standard library. I disagree that modules should be moved into the external package ecosystem. However, Go isn't preinstalled on most systems like Python. I have to develop enterprise software that runs across a wide range of platforms, and being able to take advantage of the fact that Python is pre-installed on all of these systems with its standard library…

Go programs are statically built as fat binaries. That basically solves the problem in itself. Python scripts rely on a (very) large shared constellation of thing being present on the host system. Change one of these and you might break some stuff.

Re: “Python's batteries are leaking”

#27

Post by jgibson »

new4thaccount wrote: post #20
resoluteteeth wrote: post #9

When I first used python like 20 years ago I was blown away by how much functionality was blown in, and it can be annoying using languages where even the most basic functionality involves downloading 50 packages from the internet, but on the other hand the standard library does seem to be a mess now.

Yea. I'm using Rust at the moment for fun and the amount of things not in the standard library is crazy to me. What? There is no built-in dictionary? What do I use instead and where is it? Edit: based off of all the replies below, everyone understands the validity of what I'm trying to say, but also have fortunately pointed out my admittedly grevious error of not knowing you can just import hashmap from stdlib. The e…

Er, doesn't hashmap do pretty much the same thing? https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.HashMap.htm...

Re: “Python's batteries are leaking”

#28

Post by yingw787 »

I agree with Amber’s point that more stuff should be moved from the standard library to PyPI. I made my first pull request to CPython during the development sprints this year, and it’s honestly not the best experience. Everything is built from scratch in CI after every commit, even a documentation change. There’s nowhere near enough CI builds and pipelines for everything Python supports. Pull requests are outstanding for several months, and there’s at least a thousand PRs open when I checked this morning.

I’m not sure if Python’s ideal solution is to reduce stdlib and have endorsed packages in PyPI, but it would be an improvement over the current process.

Re: “Python's batteries are leaking”

#29

Post by nicoburns »

new4thaccount wrote: post #20
resoluteteeth wrote: post #9

When I first used python like 20 years ago I was blown away by how much functionality was blown in, and it can be annoying using languages where even the most basic functionality involves downloading 50 packages from the internet, but on the other hand the standard library does seem to be a mess now.

Yea. I'm using Rust at the moment for fun and the amount of things not in the standard library is crazy to me. What? There is no built-in dictionary? What do I use instead and where is it? Edit: based off of all the replies below, everyone understands the validity of what I'm trying to say, but also have fortunately pointed out my admittedly grevious error of not knowing you can just import hashmap from stdlib. The e…

Dictionary in the python sense? There are two!

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.HashMap.htm... https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.BTreeMap.ht...

Re: “Python's batteries are leaking”

#30

Post by CDSlice »

new4thaccount wrote: post #20
resoluteteeth wrote: post #9

When I first used python like 20 years ago I was blown away by how much functionality was blown in, and it can be annoying using languages where even the most basic functionality involves downloading 50 packages from the internet, but on the other hand the standard library does seem to be a mess now.

Yea. I'm using Rust at the moment for fun and the amount of things not in the standard library is crazy to me. What? There is no built-in dictionary? What do I use instead and where is it? Edit: based off of all the replies below, everyone understands the validity of what I'm trying to say, but also have fortunately pointed out my admittedly grevious error of not knowing you can just import hashmap from stdlib. The e…

If you are using dictionary in the Python sense, Rust has that built in too, you just have to import it from the standard library collections module.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.HashMap.htm...

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