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Cool! Requests has got to be my favorite Python library. There are so many times I have replaced ~80 lines of urllib2 ugliness with 2-5 lines of requests. Simpl

by Gnewt 13y ago

Cool! Requests has got to be my favorite Python library. There are so many times I have replaced ~80 lines of urllib2 ugliness with 2-5 lines of requests. Simple, Pythonic, pretty...

sahaskatta 13y ago
Same here, cuts having to write so much fugly code. Almost wish it was inclusive with Python itself since I primarily use the language for web dev.
- TheSwordsman 13y ago
  I don't, this would require fundamental changes to the module (such as how it handles verifying SSL certificates) and it would cause API improvements to stagnate. It's painless to install, so I prefer it as a module I can just add to all of my routines. I feel like stdlib is where cool Python modules go to die...
  - dalke 13y ago
    I've been thinking about your last line. The rest of this comment is musings. I think argparse is a cool module, and definitely better than optparse or getopt for the types of things I do. Both optparse and argparse were external packages before becoming part of Python. Optparse is dead, but I don't think that argparse is dead. Some modules have a longer cycle time than Python. For examples, the decimal module (based on the 'General Decimal Arithmetic' standard) and sqlite module (based on SQLite). I think these modules are cool. I don't think either of them are dead. (But on the other hand, the *bdb modules and the underlying implementations are dead.) Some modules spun off, developed for a while on their own, and merged back into Python. Two examples were 'turtle2' and 'unittest2'. I enjoyed using unittest2, and am glad that it's part of Python 2.7 and newer. I never used turtle, but it was used in some computer classes. The turtle2 author pointed out that some computers are so locked down that the teachers can't change anything, which is why a 'turtle' in the base install can be useful. Elementtree was and is a standalone package. I use it for nearly all of my XML parsing needs. It has a C extension as an accelerator, which isn't always painless to install, especially if I want a pure-Python distribution. But on the other hand, minidom and the other XML-SIG package are dead. Then again, I didn't think they were cool. ;) I looked at what modules were added in 3.2 and 3.3: lzma, faulthandler, ipaddress, argparse, concurrent.futures, unittest.mock, .. and that's about it. (Interestingly, PEP 3156 would likely replace concurrent.futures.) So I think others agree that only the most stable of APIs should go into Python core. But I don't think that all cool Python modules which get into the core die.
    - TheSwordsman 13y ago
      I guess I haven't considered restrictions on the machines where the modules are required. So there's definitely a reason for things making their way in to stdlib in those situations. (I wish the virtualenv stuff was packaged as part of core Python, to be honest...but that's a discussion for another time.) My concern is the frustration (which may not be the right term) of having to continually bring things out of core, implement improvements, and then feed them back in to core. All the while being concerned with impact your changes may have on the entire ecosystem. All-in-all, maybe it's just moot. This could probably just be chalked up to the ebb-and-flow of software development as a whole.
      - dalke 13y ago
        I looks like your complaint might be resolved soon. It seems that 'venv' is in Python 3.4 alpha http://docs.python.org/3.4/library/venv.html http://docs.python.org/3.4/library/venv.html .
        TheSwordsman 13y ago
        Yeah. It's going to be taken care of eventually. I guess I should really get more hell-bent on converting my things to Python 3. I'm hanging on to 2.7 for dear life. I openly acknowledge I'm a bad person for it. :(
    - toyg 13y ago
      > I think argparse is a cool module, and definitely better than optparse or getopt for the types of things I do. Have you tried docopt? https://github.com/docopt/docopt https://github.com/docopt/docopt
      - dalke 13y ago
        No. I looked at it once though. I might try it in the future, but I don't think useful to change my current system. I have internal type strings which look like this "RDKit minPath=3 maxPath=7" and command-line options like "--minPath=3 --maxPath=7". I ended up making a registry of options which is used to validate the type strings and is used to populate argparse. I also use custom decoders, like a decoder to enforce that a given value is >=32 and a power of two. A quick glimpse at the docs doesn't show a way to support that ability, so it would need to be rewritten to occur after arg parsing has finished rather than during. I don't doubt that I could use docopt instead, but the amount of work to migrate doesn't seem worthwhile.
  - rspeer 13y ago
    Even Guido van Rossum said "A package in the standard library has one foot in the grave". Modules that get updated with things people need are cool. Stdlib modules can only be updated once per Python version, with great effort and extreme care not to break anything anywhere. So stdlib modules aren't cool.

by Gnewt 13y ago

Cool! Requests has got to be my favorite Python library. There are so many times I have replaced ~80 lines of urllib2 ugliness with 2-5 lines of requests. Simple, Pythonic, pretty...

sahaskatta 13y ago

Same here, cuts having to write so much fugly code. Almost wish it was inclusive with Python itself since I primarily use the language for web dev.

TheSwordsman 13y ago
I don't, this would require fundamental changes to the module (such as how it handles verifying SSL certificates) and it would cause API improvements to stagnate. It's painless to install, so I prefer it as a module I can just add to all of my routines. I feel like stdlib is where cool Python modules go to die...
- dalke 13y ago
  I've been thinking about your last line. The rest of this comment is musings. I think argparse is a cool module, and definitely better than optparse or getopt for the types of things I do. Both optparse and argparse were external packages before becoming part of Python. Optparse is dead, but I don't think that argparse is dead. Some modules have a longer cycle time than Python. For examples, the decimal module (based on the 'General Decimal Arithmetic' standard) and sqlite module (based on SQLite). I think these modules are cool. I don't think either of them are dead. (But on the other hand, the *bdb modules and the underlying implementations are dead.) Some modules spun off, developed for a while on their own, and merged back into Python. Two examples were 'turtle2' and 'unittest2'. I enjoyed using unittest2, and am glad that it's part of Python 2.7 and newer. I never used turtle, but it was used in some computer classes. The turtle2 author pointed out that some computers are so locked down that the teachers can't change anything, which is why a 'turtle' in the base install can be useful. Elementtree was and is a standalone package. I use it for nearly all of my XML parsing needs. It has a C extension as an accelerator, which isn't always painless to install, especially if I want a pure-Python distribution. But on the other hand, minidom and the other XML-SIG package are dead. Then again, I didn't think they were cool. ;) I looked at what modules were added in 3.2 and 3.3: lzma, faulthandler, ipaddress, argparse, concurrent.futures, unittest.mock, .. and that's about it. (Interestingly, PEP 3156 would likely replace concurrent.futures.) So I think others agree that only the most stable of APIs should go into Python core. But I don't think that all cool Python modules which get into the core die.
  - TheSwordsman 13y ago
    I guess I haven't considered restrictions on the machines where the modules are required. So there's definitely a reason for things making their way in to stdlib in those situations. (I wish the virtualenv stuff was packaged as part of core Python, to be honest...but that's a discussion for another time.) My concern is the frustration (which may not be the right term) of having to continually bring things out of core, implement improvements, and then feed them back in to core. All the while being concerned with impact your changes may have on the entire ecosystem. All-in-all, maybe it's just moot. This could probably just be chalked up to the ebb-and-flow of software development as a whole.
    - dalke 13y ago
      I looks like your complaint might be resolved soon. It seems that 'venv' is in Python 3.4 alpha http://docs.python.org/3.4/library/venv.html http://docs.python.org/3.4/library/venv.html .
      - TheSwordsman 13y ago
        Yeah. It's going to be taken care of eventually. I guess I should really get more hell-bent on converting my things to Python 3. I'm hanging on to 2.7 for dear life. I openly acknowledge I'm a bad person for it. :(
  - toyg 13y ago
    > I think argparse is a cool module, and definitely better than optparse or getopt for the types of things I do. Have you tried docopt? https://github.com/docopt/docopt https://github.com/docopt/docopt
    - dalke 13y ago
      No. I looked at it once though. I might try it in the future, but I don't think useful to change my current system. I have internal type strings which look like this "RDKit minPath=3 maxPath=7" and command-line options like "--minPath=3 --maxPath=7". I ended up making a registry of options which is used to validate the type strings and is used to populate argparse. I also use custom decoders, like a decoder to enforce that a given value is >=32 and a power of two. A quick glimpse at the docs doesn't show a way to support that ability, so it would need to be rewritten to occur after arg parsing has finished rather than during. I don't doubt that I could use docopt instead, but the amount of work to migrate doesn't seem worthwhile.
- rspeer 13y ago
  Even Guido van Rossum said "A package in the standard library has one foot in the grave". Modules that get updated with things people need are cool. Stdlib modules can only be updated once per Python version, with great effort and extreme care not to break anything anywhere. So stdlib modules aren't cool.