Python does not play well with others

[Chris Mellon]

On 1/23/07, John Nagle <nagle at animats.com> wrote:
>    The major complaint I have about Python is that the packages
> which connect it to other software components all seem to have
> serious problems.  As long as you don't need to talk to anything
> outside the Python world, you're fine.  But once you do, things
> go downhill.  MySQLdb has version and platform compatibility
> problems.  So does M2Crypto.  The built-in SSL support is weak.
> Even basic sockets don't quite work right; the socket module
> encapsulates the timeout mechanism but doesn't get it right.
>
>    In the Perl, Java, PHP, and C/C++ worlds, the equivalent
> functions just work.   That's because, in those worlds, either the
> development team for the language or the development team
> for the subsystem takes responsibility for making them work.
> Only Python doesn't do that.
>
>    Python has been around long enough that this should have
> been fixed by now.
>
>                                         John Nagle

This just isn't correct. You think that socket libraries don't have
incompatibilities in C and that C++ libraries don't have versioning
problems? You think that SSL works right from Java in all cases, or
that changing your mysql client libraries underneath PHP won't affect
it?