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Comment by JNRowe | Hacker News Reader

I tend to drift in and out of Python, and follow the same pattern as you suggest when coming back after a couple of releases. Python's version notes are truly excellent¹.

The only thing I really wish for is an ecosystem "what's now" guide, it would list things such as where the community has moved for common libraries. Off the top of my head it would have covered things like nose to pytest and such. Obvious problem being I just can't imagine how you'd get buy-in to make such a thing work, especially without it getting overrun with grifters.

¹ https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/index.html

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There's the Hitchhiker's Guide to Python which has a lot of advice and covers best practices and/or projects over a number of big areas like web frameworks, databases, command line tools, etc.: https://docs.python-guide.org/

Yeah, something like that.

However, taking "Command-line Applications"¹ as an example it lists six alternatives. I think in the version I'd like to see a good few of them would disappear. For example, I'll presume plac/fire/cement aren't in common use given that only two are packaged in Debian and the two that are don't have reverse dependencies. Cliff looks largely uninteresting too, as outside of OpenStack nothing seems to use it.

I think my ideal implementation would probe recent releases of popular packages for dependencies to see what the community has settled on or moved to. I also suspect this comment that somewhat moves the goalposts also points to the difficulties of maintaining such a document.

¹ https://docs.python-guide.org/scenarios/cli/

Totally agree with you. I would put argparse, the built-in command line argument parser, over Click on that list. Click is great, but it's one more API to internalize, for something that's not really the meat and potatoes of your application.

That said, when I started out using Python professionally, I got a lot of mileage out of this guide.

The problem is, any such whats-now guide is very soon already outdated, at least in some aspects. It should be a Wiki which everyone can edit.

And btw, such Wiki exists, even officially: https://wiki.python.org/moin/FrontPage

Although, as you might expect, it is a mixture of outdated, more recent, messy, detailed, lists or guides and everything.

What are the current common libraries also doesn't really have a simple answer. Maybe this should be auto-generated based on Google or GitHub trends.

>> What are the current common libraries also doesn't really have a simple answer. Maybe this should be auto-generated based on Google or GitHub trends.

I followed the Python and PSF community very closely for about 12 years through 2018. I haven't kept up for personal reasons. I suspect they are uncomfortable with doing this because they don't want to feel like they are picking winners. Whatever they list will be "blessed" no matter how many disclaimers are attached. In a way, I observe a similar problem impacting how they've approached ecosystem problems like packaging. There is a clear issue and a central authority was needed to sort it out and that never emerged when it was originally required.

Right now PyPI highlights some trends (https://pypi.org), but there is more they could do. Python success stories at https://www.python.org/success-stories/ could probably be evolved to highlight some of the libraries and tools which get serious usage. Anything that's autogenerated from other sources probably has value, but would only be something that would be compatible if it's detached from python.org. Expanding PyPI trend information would be more compatible with python.org.

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