The node.js Community is Quietly Changing the Face of Open Source

[rusi]

On Apr 16, 10:42 pm, Terry Jan Reedy <tjre... at udel.edu> wrote:
> > "The “Batteries included” philosophy of Python was definitely the right
> > approach during the mid 90’s and one of the reasons that I loved Python
> > so much; this was a time before modern package management, and before it
> > was easy to find and install community-created libraries.  Nowadays
>
> Python gets used in places like corporations and schools where one
> cannot simply install stuff off the net, but must fill out a form asking
> permission, or maybe not ask at all.

Yes I agree. Different healthy organisms are healthy based on
different logic/laws. Python has no reason to follow node. [And the
Roderick link is obviously a bit of a rant and a polemic]  In
particular one of the strongest (for me) features of python is the
standard library.  Recently I have been working with erlang and every
so often when scratching my head against some impenetrable
documentation, I would find myself saying: "God bless Guido for the
python-docs"

So, no, I am not critical of the std-lib.

My wish is for a slightly larger perspective.  Think of 3 concentric
circles:
1. Python the language
2. Python std lib
3. Python 3rd party packages (that use 1 and 2)

1 and 2 are fine. And for any one person or small group to be fully
conversant of the whole of 3 is unreasonable.
However the surrounding infrastructure needed to populate/explore/use
3 could do with some love:

- the distutils/distutils2/distribute/setuptools situation combined
with pip and pypi
- executable building (py2exe)
- handling multiple pythons and packages eg virtualenv
- tox and the various alternatives to testing