There are two other interpretations of the statement. One is that you don't need any import/includes, which is true of PHP but not of Python. The second is you

There are two other interpretations of the statement. One is that you don't need any import/includes, which is true of PHP but not of Python. The second is you don't need any external dependencies "out of the box", ignoring the fact that someone had to make the box[1] for you at some point which you mention here. This is true of PHP, and only half-true of Python: I remember messing with "import cgi" at some point, Flask is so so much better. [1] Gentoo's USE flags for PHP (the ones with - are the ones I haven't compiled in for my box): apache2 bcmath berkdb bzip2 cgi cjk cli crypt ctype curl curlwrappers fileinfo filter ftp gd gdbm hash iconv ipv6 json mysql mysqli nls pdo phar posix postgres readline session simplexml sockets spell sqlite sqlite3 ssl threads tokenizer truetype unicode xml xmlreader xpm zip zlib -calendar -cdb -debug -doc -embed -enchant -exif -firebird -flatfile -fpm -frontbase -gmp -imap -inifile -intl -iodbc -kerberos -kolab -ldap -ldap-sasl -libedit -mhash -mssql -mysqlnd -oci8-instant-client -odbc -pcntl -pic -qdbm -recode -sharedmem -snmp -soap -suhosin -sybase-ct -sysvipc -tidy -wddx -xmlrpc -xmlwriter -xsl