ease (was Re: Messaging in Py?)

[Kendall Clark]

"Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<9eak3d08ca at enews1.newsguy.com>...
> "Kendall Clark" <kendall at monkeyfist.com> wrote in message
> news:aa03c0d9.0105201805.2bd5a19c at posting.google.com...
>     ...
> > Seriously, while I agree that it's easy to write networking code
> > in Python, nothing's easier than finding out someone's already done
> > or started the project you need, and you can help out or adapt their
> 
> Sometimes I wonder about this "apparently self-evident truth".
> 
> Python makes certain kinds of tasks *SO* deucedly easy (this
> doesn't necessarily apply to the specific one being discussed
> here -- this is just a generic musing!-), that the temptation
> IS serious to just recode it and be done, rather than start
> looking for an already-almost-there solution out on the web.

Gee, Alex, that was, after all, my point. That is, no matter
how easy Python makes programming, it's easier to use the code
someone else has already written, if it does what you need, or
can easily be adapted to do what you need. The other benefit is,
as you point out, non-proliferation of modules in the same space,
all of which are just different enough so as to prevent consolidation
and improvement.

And now, for a bit of heresy, I wonder if there isn't something to
be said, in addition to the ease of Python, against Python too?

Is there less code reuse than there should be and is that a fault
of Python's? Of Pythoneers? Of lacks in infrastructure (think CPAN
for Perl, code images in Smalltalk)?

Or maybe my expectations for reuse are too high, or I'm not seeing
all the reuse that's going on?

I have been able to confirm, in the course of reading these lists and
coding Python for about two years, what a Squeaking Erlanger friend of
mine, Bijan Parsia, has said about Python for some time: the chief unit
of Python code reuse and modularity is not the class but the module.

I certainly reuse other people's modules far more than I subclass other
people's classes.

Is that just me or do others code similarly?

Kendall "Waiting for Courageous to release that pub/sub code" Clark