[yeukhon]

> That you and I even have this discussion at all and that there are hundreds of thousands of caught ImportErrors on that specific example on GitHub is my point regarding standard library stability;

That fact that thousands of files catching ImportError does not necessarily implies folks are questioning stdlib's stability. That merely means some people are deliberately choosing to prefer simplejson over json. The benchmarks demonstrated json module before Python 3 could be slower than simplejson, but json module since Python 3 has beaten simplejso in terms of speed of execution. Furthermore, there are old Stackoverflow threads on usjon vs simplejson vs json regarding performance. All the above would naturally suggest folks who choose to prefer simplejson over json is due to the concern of speed, rather than opinion on stability.

Also, stability is the wrong term for the problem you are describing. Agility is probably the better word. Python release tends ot be backward compatible (of course except Python 2 vs Python 3 and a few other modules like asyncio). Python core developers try not to break applications. If anything, non-core libraries will break compatibility more frequently without having to face larger opposiitons; I can break simplejson if I were the maintainer of simplejson. The consequence is maybe a couple angry GitHub issues and a few blog posts, unlike Python 3 which still gets a lot of angry media coverage till this day.

The problem with stdlib is absolutely about agility. The core community is extremely small. It can take many weeks and sometimes months to get your commit merged. The reason I like to keep stdlib around is good citizenship. I would love to have requests in the stdlib, but in a more agile and more frequent release. Python isn't the only player. OS distro are also responsible for the slowness. There's been discussion on python-dev regarding more frequent release and even potentially breaking up stdlib could be an option for the Python community.