[chimeracoder]

> An overstatement, certainly, but with more than a germ a truth. Once a library is enshrined in the standard set, it can’t change radically because too many programs rely on it—and its bugs, idiosyncrasies, and complications—remaining stable.

That's a problem inherent in the standardization process, though - it's all but contradictory to have something be both 'standard' and 'continuously improving'.

Once something enters the standard, does anyone propose a better way of removing cruft without constantly deprecating everything, rendering the concept of a 'standard' somewhat meaningless?

[lloeki]

Things come and go, and we have seen a number of deprecations in python already. urllib predates urllib2, while subprocess deprecates a number of things itself that really came from C. getopt was a port of the eponymous C library, which optparse meant to replace, which was itself deprecated on favor of argparse.

I would really not be surprised to see envoy, requests and so on come up in the standard lib at some point.