[ulope]

Because it leads to namespace pollution and hard-to-track-down bugs.

It's especially bad in this case where adding an executable in the system can suddenly shadow any built-in name (e.g. imagine someone adds a "print" or "sys" executable).

[gbog]

Refactoring is also made much harder with import * if you have cascading modules. I have a pylint hook forbidding these before committing to our hg repo