Python does not play well with others

[Kay Schluehr]

On 25 Jan., 04:46, "Paul Boddie" <p... at boddie.org.uk> wrote:

> >   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.And this is where I'd almost reach agreement with you. It's not enough
> for the language to keep growing new features if the libraries are
> broken or appear archaic, and this task seems to be outside the "core
> developers" area of interest.

But it shouldn't be - although this is not a request for the core
developers to maintain any 3rd party package in the world, of course. A
while ago someone on python-dev suggested to use builtbot to monitor
were 3rd party packages get broken by new Python releases and offered
this as a service to library developers. I do think this and similar
ideas are relevant to improve overall quality, not only that of the
CPython interpreter. I would also suggest stricter policies for PyPI
were unmaintained packages might be removed after a period ( or at
least tagged in a certain way ).

But maybe admitting quality problems of free software that is affecting
the whole community ( and not just isolated projects ) is just too much
negative PR on a "competitive language market"? We all know Ruby makes
us happy and Haskell is driven by real academics, who are doing
software engineering right, by default. Maybe Python could survive only
leaving the impression that it binds to everything and has an ever
growing code base of high quality?