Not enough Python library development [was PEP scepticism]

[Guido van Rossum]

Roman Suzi <rnd at onego.ru> writes:

> Is there a formal TODO list of the libraries and respective priorities?

No, although there's a PEP for small feature requests (PEP 42).

If you want to start making a list of missing libraries and submit a
PEP, please do!  I'm sure many people will want to contribute.

> For example, I think that some sort of standard GUI could help Python to
> fight Java with it's Swing/AWT...

This was tried many times -- there was even a GUI-sig with this goal.
Nothing ever came to fruition.  The problem is that designing and
implementing a standard GUI that can compete with the existing
offerings it an enormous amount of work, and folks always ran out of
steam before they were even done with the requirements gathering.

The folks who produced wrappers for existing GUI toolkits available
for C or C++ were much more successful, so that's what we got.  Python
has more GUI choices than Java, and that's a good thing.

> It could be also interesting to have time module as powerful as mxDateTime
> in standard library. And so on.

Well, propose one.  But what exactly is the point of adding it to the
standard library when you can get mxDateTime if you need it?  I'd say
your energy is better spent on reviving the catalog-sig (Python's
CPAN-like effort, which needs new energy!)

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)