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.
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. 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? 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? -- ?!ng