Better Batteries
This article explores the organizational challenges behind building high-quality standard libraries for programming languages like Python, Go, and Rust. It argues that success depends more on social and institutional architecture than on technical design alone.
Why it matters
Understanding the governance of open-source software is critical for the long-term sustainability and evolution of the tools that power the global digital economy.
One of the eternal schisms in programming is over the question of whether the standard library should be minimal or encompassing. This is the wrong question to ask. The right one is:
Which social architecture creates a high-quality standard library?
Python is always brought up as example of leaky batteries exploding in slow motion, but this has nothing to do with size . The problem with Python’s stdlib is its, ahem, uneven quality. Some standard library modules don’t follow language naming conventions! You know which unittest module I am talking about :-)
But even that is not a mistake. It’s actually Python core’s advantage — that it makes functionality available early, not thinking about the future too much. That’s how we ended up with ossified cAPI which makes CPython the language, but that is also how we ended up with Python powering data scientific revolution.
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