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by ayrx 3440 days ago
> This isn’t a question that comes up so often with respect to (say) Python because Python has an effective form of curation – blessing things into the standard library, at which point their alternatives generally disappear. In effect, Python modules are quality-filtered on the taste of the BDFL and the devteam.

I love Python but this statement is absolutely coming from someone who does not write Python on a regular basis. Many stdlib modules are greatly outclassed by third-party alternatives - urllib2 vs requests, datetime vs arrow just to name a few - to the point where no one actually uses the stdlib modules in production.

3 comments

Sure, but even then, I think his point is still applicable. It's urllib2 and requests, not urllib2 and requests and 20 other libraries. The fact that an inferior library is being kept alive by being in the stdlib is maybe unfortunate, but there's still only a small number of choices overall. That makes it much easier to do research and see within the first few search results that the majority of the community recommends one over the other.
His point is absolutely not applicable. Rust is a _very_ new language. The community will eventually converge on specific crates for specific purposes in time.
requests was indeed asked to join the stdlib. However, the schedule required for distribution would have made it more difficult for them to innovate in their current way. [0]

[0] https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/issues/2424

The libraries you mentioned augment the stdlib rather than replacing it.