Amber Brown: Batteries Included, But They're Leaking

[John Ladasky]

On Saturday, May 18, 2019 at 2:21:59 PM UTC-7, Paul Rubin wrote:
> http://pyfound.blogspot.com/2019/05/amber-brown-batteries-included-but.html
> 
> This was a controversial talk at the Python language summit, giving
> various criticisms of Python's standard library,

I will try to find some time to read through Amber Brown's remarks.  For now, I just want to remind everyone that we had this exact discussion here, about two years ago.  First post in the thread, if you want to see the source:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/comp.lang.python/B2ODmhMS-x4/KMpF4yuHBAAJ


Here are a few excerpts from the thread:


On Saturday, September 16, 2017 at 11:01:03 PM UTC-7, Terry Reedy wrote: 
> The particular crippler for CLBG [Computer Language Benchmark Game]
> problems is the non-use of numpy in numerical calculations, such as the
> n-body problem.  Numerical python extensions are over two decades old 
> and give Python code access to optimized, compiled BLAS, LinPack, 
> FFTPack, and so on.  The current one, numpy, is the third of the series.
> It is both a historical accident and a continuing administrative
> convenience that numpy is not part of the Python stdlib. 


On Monday, September 18, 2017 at 10:21:55 PM UTC+1, John Ladasky wrote: 
> OK, I found this statement intriguing.  Honestly, I can't function without
> Numpy, but I have always assumed that many Python programmers do so. 
> Meanwhile: most of the time, I have no use for urllib, but that module is
> in the standard library. 
> 
> I noticed the adoption of the @ operation for matrix multiplication.  I 
> have yet to use it myself. 
> 
> So is there a fraction of the Python community that thinks that Numpy 
> should in fact become part of the Python stdlib?  What is the 
> "administrative convenience" to which you refer? 


On 2017-09-18 23:08, bream... at gmail.com wrote: 
> My very opinionated personnal opinion is that many third party libraries 
> are much better off outside of the stdlib, numpy particulary so as it's
> one of the most used, if not the most used, such libraries. 
> 
> My rationale is simple, the authors of the libraries are not tied into 
> the (c)Python release cycle, the PEP process or anything else, they can
> just get on with it. 
> 
> Consider my approach many blue moons ago when I was asking when the "new"
> regex module was going to be incorporated into Python, and getting a bit
> miffed in my normal XXXL size hat autistic way when it didn't happen.  I
> am now convinved that back then I was very firmly wrong, and that staying
> out of the stdlib has been the best thing that could have happened to
> regex.


On Tuesday, September 19, 2017 at 12:11:58 AM UTC-7, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Sep 2017 01:13:23 +0100, MRAB wrote:
> 
> > I even have it on a Raspberry Pi. "pip install regex" is all it took. No
> > need for it to be in the stdlib. :-)
> 
> That's fine for those of us who can run pip and install software from the 
> web without being immediately fired, and for those who have installation 
> rights on the computers they use. And those with easy, cheap and fast 
> access to the internet.
> 
> Not everyone is so lucky.


I'm not offering an opinion, just some historical context FYI.