[xaa]

I would argue that Python's approach is FAR better than Clojure/Leiningen's "no batteries included" approach.

Suppose you want to do a very common task like parse some XML. In Clojure, the workflow is:

  1. Go to Github or Clojars, find the latest version number  of clojure.data.xml

  2. Add this version number to your project.clj

  3. Lein deps and restart the repl

  4. Re-acquire whatever REPL data you had

In Python, it's:

  1. import xml.{sax,dom,etree}

And, paradoxically, the availability of all these different versions of libraries in Clojure leads to MORE conflicts between libraries than would otherwise be the case, not less. In Python, you may not agree that, say, the "os" or "subprocess" modules are optimal -- but by golly, they're consistent.

[dpritchett]

Thanks to pip I often don't even bother with the Python stdlib for crusty things like one-off web scrapes or XML parsing. Here's a recent example where I wanted to read some attributes out of some remote XML and did it with requests and PyQuery rather than urllib and xml:

    _domains_text = requests.get(API_URL + "/domainlist.xml").content
    _domains_db = pyquery.PyQuery(_domains_text)
    
    DOMAINS = [d.values()[0] for d in _domains_db('domain')]

[RegEx]

I like to set

    jQuery = pyquery.PyQuery(someHTMLDocumentString)

So I can use jQuery like I'm used to. At this point, you can do

    links = jQuery('a')

or whatever.