the whole 'batteries included' idea

J

John Salerno

Pardon my naivety, you would think maybe I'd understand this by now, but
I've always kind of wondered about it. I've been curious why one of the
biggest points used to promote Python is that it has "batteries
included." True, this is a great feature, but the way it's been used
seems to suggest that other languages *don't* have this benefit. And
maybe they don't, in their own way.

So my question is, what is the difference between Python's 'batteries'
(standard modules), and C#'s framework? I know nothing of Java, but I
assume it has its own rich (and confusing) set of classes as well. Is
there something different about other languages' libraries/frameworks
that makes Python's different, and worthy of being touted as 'batteries
included'?

I hope that question even makes sense! :)
 
L

Larry Bates

John said:
Pardon my naivety, you would think maybe I'd understand this by now, but
I've always kind of wondered about it. I've been curious why one of the
biggest points used to promote Python is that it has "batteries
included." True, this is a great feature, but the way it's been used
seems to suggest that other languages *don't* have this benefit. And
maybe they don't, in their own way.

So my question is, what is the difference between Python's 'batteries'
(standard modules), and C#'s framework? I know nothing of Java, but I
assume it has its own rich (and confusing) set of classes as well. Is
there something different about other languages' libraries/frameworks
that makes Python's different, and worthy of being touted as 'batteries
included'?

I hope that question even makes sense! :)

I believe Python is unique in the depth of the standard library when
compared to most languages. Most require that you purchase or get many
of the "batteries" from somewhere outside the standard distribution.
Things like FTP clients, SMTP clients, webservers, etc. aren't normally
there by default.

-Larry Bates
 
J

Jarek Zgoda

John Salerno napisa³(a):
So my question is, what is the difference between Python's 'batteries'
(standard modules), and C#'s framework? I know nothing of Java, but I
assume it has its own rich (and confusing) set of classes as well. Is
there something different about other languages' libraries/frameworks
that makes Python's different, and worthy of being touted as 'batteries
included'?

I can speak only for Java -- its batteries are not included, you have to
download jakarta-commons plus (since Python 2.5) JDOM to get the effect
similar to Python's stdlib. Java library only seems to be complete (i.e.
when looking on included classes), but its support for common
programming tasks is just inadequate.
 
B

Ben Sizer

John said:
Pardon my naivety, you would think maybe I'd understand this by now, but
I've always kind of wondered about it. I've been curious why one of the
biggest points used to promote Python is that it has "batteries
included." True, this is a great feature, but the way it's been used
seems to suggest that other languages *don't* have this benefit. And
maybe they don't, in their own way.

So my question is, what is the difference between Python's 'batteries'
(standard modules), and C#'s framework?

I can't speak for C#'s framework but Python has a lot of modules that
other languages may not, such as zip/bzip archive handling, unit
testing, database interface modules, pretty much any network protocol
you might need, both types of XML handling, etc. For many tasks, it's
complete as-is, and that's a point worth selling.

I don't think it's as good as some people make out, though. Multimedia
support is poor - OpenGL support should have gone in many, many
versions ago, and presumably one of the trillion incarnations of
libraries for fast mathematics should have gone in too in order to
enable that. PyGame could possibly have gone in too (not sure about the
license however).
 

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