lost interest?

[Skip Montanaro]

    Alex> If it encourages more reuse of code in module A by the author of
    Alex> module B, I think it would be a VERY good influence "in the Python
    Alex> world".  Why *shouldn't* the useful 3rd-party modules we use be
    Alex> free to rely on other useful 3rd-party modules yet?!

    Skip> Python authors are free to rely on any modules they like,
    Skip> third-party or otherwise.  That they don't suggests to me that
    Skip> there's generally fairly little need to do that, at least for
    Skip> widely used packages.

    Tim> That may be true, but it just seems so hard to believe that, in so
    Tim> many non-interdependent modules, no one's reinventing the wheel in
    Tim> the least.

Yeah, people reinvent the wheel all the time.  If one wheel or another is
better, Darwinian selection tends to work pretty well to get rid of the bent
or not-so-shiny ones.  This process is sometimes sped up when Guido chooses
a new wheel for his next bike (distribution).  Recent case: unit testing.
There were, as I recall, three fairly "common" unit test modules.  Python
now has two of them (unittest (aka PyUnit) and doctest) in the core.  (It
works to have two in this case because they address somewhat different
niches.)  I can't remember what the third unit test module was anymore.

One area where Darwinian selection is still at work is in web application
servers.  I doubt any of the options (Zope, Quixote, etc) will ever be
incorporated into the core.  They will all either find niches or disappear.

In Perl, do any of the various options available get blessed by Larry, thus
killing off all the other wheels?

Skip