[gpjt]

That's an interesting point. I guess the distinction we want to make is between creating private APIs that would lock people in, and enabling them to use appropriate standards and publicly-available modules. So integrating with (say) WebGL for graphics, or making it easy for people to mount their own EBS volumes or access S3 (we're running on AWS anyway) would be good, whereas insisting that the only way to display plots of data was to call our private API would be bad.

Does that make sense?

[wladimir]

Yes, exactly. I think it makes sense to use standard modules if possible, but use private APIs for functionality that is not in the standard Python.