Better Batteries

Better Batteries Aug 20, 2026 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. The Go standard library is similarly encompassing, but it is held in a high regard. Go team…