How clean/elegant is Python's syntax?

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 7:01 AM, Walter Hurry <walterhurry at lavabit.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 30 May 2013 04:54:44 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:
>
> <snip>
>> GUIs and databasing are two of the areas where I
>> think Python's standard library could stand to be improved a bit.
>> There are definitely some rough edges there.
>
> Dunno what you mean about "standard library", but I'm very happy with
> wxPython and psycopg2 for GUIs and databasing respectively.

They are not part of the standard library. Yes, Python is strongly
enhanced by additional packages off PyPI, but that's not the same
thing; if I publish a program that requires psycopg2, I can't simply
say "go get Python from your OS's repository or python.org", I have to
also instruct people to install another package. On Debian, I can
simply apt-get python-psycopg2, which I would trust to be (a) a stable
build, (b) compatible with the apt-gettable python (which is 2.7.3;
ditto python3-psycopg2 and python3, for 3.2.3), and (c) from an
authoritative source. There's probably a way to do this for other
Linuxes too, but I don't know the exact package names everywhere. And
on Windows, I have no idea what the best way would be.

These days, networking is considered essential. Python's standard
library includes basic sockets, HTTP (client and server), etc. AFAIK
Python doesn't have obscurities like DNS (obviously you can connect a
socket by hostname, but you can't look up an SPF record, nor can you
write a DNS server), but networking generally is considered important
enough to be inbuilt. Why is databasing second-class?

ChrisA