Thoughts on some stdlib modules

[Nick Efford]

vegetax <vegeta.z at gmail.com> wrote:

> And those thoughts comes to mind again, if python is such a great language
> why does the stdlib is so bloated with duplication,bad bad library
> design,clumsy to use modules,etc.

> I mean is this normal? i dont think so.I havent seen such a messy stdlib in
> any language.

Perl hardly covers itself with glory in this regard.

And what of Java? AWT & Swing, Date & Calendar, Streams, Readers
and java.nio...  There's a lot of complex layering going on there,
with many older features being buried and then deprecated (actually
or effectively).  The net result may be interesting for software
archaeologists, but hardly inspires the notion of a coherently
designed library.

> Is it because of legacy code and backwards compatibility or

The full benefits and limitations of particular design decisions take
a while to emerge, after which point people are depending on the
code and you are limited to refactoring the implementation without
changing the interface - unless you are prepared for the howls
of protest from those whose code breaks.  So to some extent the
problems you mention are unavoidable - but I think you overstate
your case.

> because not too much people in the python-dev cares about library design?

I doubt that.

> admit the python language design is really really great but the stdlib is
> totally forgotten.

This is a very extreme view.  The standard library isn't perfect,
but it is far from being the mess you imply.

My own personal bugbear is the issue of consistency.  Java's standard
library might be a huge and clumsy beast with more than its fair share
of overloading and obsolescence, but it at least has the virtue of more
consistently following conventions on how classes and methods are
named, for instance.


Nick