On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Guido van Rossum wrote:
Why not add this to cgi.py instead?
Because that would seem to defeat most of the point.
The point was to provide an instant, effortless improvement for all of the Python CGI scripts out there. If programmers have to manually edit all of their CGI scripts to insert
import sys, cgitb sys.excepthook = cgitb.excepthook
then it's just as annoying as inserting
import sys sys.stderr = sys.stdout
I don't want people to have to edit every single script.
You misunderstand. You proposed a few lines that would automatically do this in site.py, which is always imported. I propose to add those same lines to cgi.py, so that any code that imports cgi.py *automatically* has he feature enabled. I assume that all CGI scripts have an import of cgi. There are non-CGI scripts that import cgi, but those will be protected by the check for an environment variable that you propose.
I don't like new additions that are irrelevant for most apps (CGI is a tiny niche for Python IMO).
I think this is where our perceptions differ. I think of CGI as the application that totally "made" Perl, and as the quickest, easiest way that many beginners get early payoff from a scripting language.
Yeah. But it's not doing that for Python IMO. Most Python apps (even those that do web stuff) are not CGI apps.
My impression is that it has been a big "hook" for bringing people to Perl and Python -- it's the shortest path to building and deploying something useful to a huge and unlimited audience.
Wouldn't you say there are more Python CGI programmers out there than, say, Zope developers? Or think of it like this: what fraction of Web developers are CGI programmers, and what fraction of those use Python?
I don't want Python to become a wannabe CGI language, and I don't want to make choices that benefit CGI programmers to the detriment of others (CGI is actually a pretty lame way of producing active web content). Python is a decent language for CGI, but Perl is the established standard and then there's PHP which also has way more users than Python.
Maybe i'm wrong? I welcome more opinions from others -- how do you see people coming to Python? What's the first "real" thing they do with Python that motivates them to try it?
All sorts of stuff. Using NumPy. GUI apps. Database apps. Unix scripting. App steering. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)