Requests v2.0 Python module released

I think argparse is a cool module, and definitely better than optparse or getopt for the types of things I do. Both optparse and argparse were external packages before becoming part of Python. Optparse is dead, but I don't think that argparse is dead.

Some modules have a longer cycle time than Python. For examples, the decimal module (based on the 'General Decimal Arithmetic' standard) and sqlite module (based on SQLite).

I think these modules are cool. I don't think either of them are dead. (But on the other hand, the *bdb modules and the underlying implementations are dead.)

Some modules spun off, developed for a while on their own, and merged back into Python. Two examples were 'turtle2' and 'unittest2'. I enjoyed using unittest2, and am glad that it's part of Python 2.7 and newer. I never used turtle, but it was used in some computer classes. The turtle2 author pointed out that some computers are so locked down that the teachers can't change anything, which is why a 'turtle' in the base install can be useful.

Elementtree was and is a standalone package. I use it for nearly all of my XML parsing needs. It has a C extension as an accelerator, which isn't always painless to install, especially if I want a pure-Python distribution.

But on the other hand, minidom and the other XML-SIG package are dead. Then again, I didn't think they were cool. ;)

I looked at what modules were added in 3.2 and 3.3: lzma, faulthandler, ipaddress, argparse, concurrent.futures, unittest.mock, .. and that's about it.

(Interestingly, PEP 3156 would likely replace concurrent.futures.)

So I think others agree that only the most stable of APIs should go into Python core. But I don't think that all cool Python modules which get into the core die.

Modules that get updated with things people need are cool. Stdlib modules can only be updated once per Python version, with great effort and extreme care not to break anything anywhere. So stdlib modules aren't cool.