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emanuelez | 11 years ago

I guess that's what attracted people to Python some ten years ago, as opposed to Perl. One can be sure that CPAN has a Perl library fit for your needs, but having such features in the standard library makes a big difference for a newcomer.

The same could be said in the devops context with Ansible vs Chef/Puppet. Ansible joined the game pretty late, but it's attracting a lot of users because of its "batteries included" philosophy. But this battle is still ongoing and only history will tell us the winner.

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ef4|11 years ago

> having such features in the standard library makes a big difference for a newcomer.

And not just for the newcomer. The biggest benefit is that your dependencies and your dependencies dependencies can all compose better when they're all using the same standard implementation of feature X.

The extreme case of this problem was c++ in the bad old days when lots of organizations were writing their own String libraries. Inevitably, you'd add a dependency that pulled in yet another incompatible string implementation.