the whole 'batteries included' idea

[Ben Sizer]

John Salerno wrote:
> Pardon my naivety, you would think maybe I'd understand this by now, but
> I've always kind of wondered about it. I've been curious why one of the
> biggest points used to promote Python is that it has "batteries
> included." True, this is a great feature, but the way it's been used
> seems to suggest that other languages *don't* have this benefit. And
> maybe they don't, in their own way.
>
> So my question is, what is the difference between Python's 'batteries'
> (standard modules), and C#'s framework?

I can't speak for C#'s framework but Python has a lot of modules that
other languages may not, such as zip/bzip archive handling, unit
testing, database interface modules, pretty much any network protocol
you might need, both types of XML handling, etc. For many tasks, it's
complete as-is, and that's a point worth selling.

I don't think it's as good as some people make out, though. Multimedia
support is poor - OpenGL support should have gone in many, many
versions ago, and presumably one of the trillion incarnations of
libraries for fast mathematics should have gone in too in order to
enable that. PyGame could possibly have gone in too (not sure about the
license however).

-- 
Ben Sizer