PEP idea: On Windows, subprocess should implicitly support .bat and .cmd scripts by using FindExecutable from win32 API

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 10:41 PM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>:
>
>> I was specifically disagreeing with the notion that it's right and
>> normal to write a bunch of platform-specific code in Python. That
>> should be the rarity.
>
> Why is that?
>
> Code is written for a specific need and environment. Often trying to
> write generic solutions leads to cumbersome and clunky results on *all*
> platforms.
>
> A software system is defined through its interfaces.

And the most important interface is with a human. Humans are the same
whether you're running under Windows, Linux, or anything else. If you
want to write single-platform code, go for it; but if you want to
write cross-platform code, the best way is to let someone else take
care of the differences, abstracting them away into a nice tidy thing
that we call a high-level language.

I don't need forking, file descriptors, or process IDs, to describe
how a person uses my code. Those are *implementation details*. Now, it
might be that I have to concern myself with some of them. Maybe I want
to get optimal performance out of something, and that means using
multiple processes and managing them properly. Maybe I need to
interface with systemd, respond to dozens of different process-level
signals, use directory notifications, and do a bunch of other
Linux-only things, so maybe it's just completely impractical to
consider supporting even BSD-based Unixes, much less Windows. So be
it. But to the greatest extent possible, Python should let me write
code that doesn't care about any of that.

ChrisA