Better Batteries

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:

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.

The Go standard library is similarly encompassing, but it is held in a high regard. Go team has institutional capacity to deliver well-designed API for the standard library, and then some: https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x

Rust is an interesting case. The 1.0 standard library APIs are brilliant. Collections and iterators are a work of art. But it also feels that, while the current team has the capacity to preserve existing APIs and fill in some gaps, the capacity to execute design decisions is limited. While golang.org/x captures excess capacity, rust-lang-nursery is a graveyard. Maybe I am over-indexing on my favorite hobby-horse, but it seems that the reason for Rust not having an API to get a stream of random bytes from the OS in 2026 is that, while it is an easy technical problem, it requires tricky organization architecture (including getting money in peoples’ pockets, of course) to actually get solved in the high-stakes environment of a world-wide coordination problem called a programming language.