On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 01:39:12AM -0400, John Wong wrote:
I like stdlib++, but I also want to say it should remain as non-Python-dev endorsement kind of thing. As a user and a library developer, I see pros and cons.
Official endorsement can lead to people to abandon whatever they are working or make them feel excluded or unappreciated, which is not a very positive thing to do.
Yes. Also, it can discourage innovation and encourage monoculture.
As has often been said, the standard library is where good packages go to die. In the standard library, a package is ubiquitous, but it's also pretty much in stasis, unlikely to change much.
"We biologists have a word for stable: 'dead'." - some biologist
So if you want something under active development, likely to gain new features, you normally look outside the std lib, where there is plenty of innovation, experimentation and competition.
Now imagine that one package gets recommended as "best of breed" for some particular task in this hypothetical stdlib++. It will combine the ubiquity of the stdlib (because everyone uses it) without the disadvantage of stasis. That could make it much harder for a new package in the same field to become well-known enough to compete for users and developers.
Now obviously there are "best of breed" third party libraries. I don't see many people trying to build a better BeautifulSoup. (Maybe they are, and I just don't know about them, which demonstrates the problem.) That's not necessarily a bad thing. But I think we should be careful of putting the thumb on the scales too much.