The Python standard library is overall very solid. However, it has a few darker corners - and, in the past, HTTP handling was not as easy as it could be. In the age of APIs, the requests library filled this void with a compellingly simple solution and became one of the most popular libraries (with millions of downloads every month [1]).

[1] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/requests

In the Python world it's as famous as Joda or Hibernate would be for Javaists...

> Exactly how famous is this library?

It is the de-facto standard for anything that has to interact with a API, or just HTTP in general. The old way to do these sort of things was the urllib2 module (part of the Python standard library). urllib2 has some design flaws and can be a pain to work with.

Extremely popular - almost every HTTP client library I use has switched to requests over the last couple years.

As a proxy, check out the download counts on this tracker using data from the PyPI, where the vast majority of Python packages are installed from:

https://python3wos.appspot.com/

Looking at the top few packages: * simplejson is the upstream for the json module in stdlib which people install since it gets performance updates first * requests * six: the most common library used to bridge the Python 2/3 transition * virtualenv: near-ubiquitous development tool (it allows you to maintain a separate Python environment for each project to avoid cross-talk, and is also used by popular testing tools like tox which run your tests under a variety of Python versions) * distribute: a few years back, the stdlib setuptools module was forked for a major overhaul. That's since been merged back in but many packages still reference it, particularly in older releases * boto: AWS client library, used by the official awscli tool * pip: Python package installer, now bundled with Python but updates & older versions of Python use the PyPI version

About as famous as they come in the python community. It is the perfect example of a library done right. I've yet to meet a developer who have used it that dislike it.

It handles all of the low level stuff for you, such as sessions, cookies, gzip, form encoding POSTs, composing URLs with arguments, thread safety etc. etc. without you even having to be aware of them, all in a terse and more readable format. It does it without taking the ability away to control those if you really want to, not that you're likely to need to anyway.

Take a look at the two examples here, one using the standard library for http, urllib2, and the other using requests: https://gist.github.com/kennethreitz/973705

I want requests to exist in pretty much every language. The API is clean and simple and perfectly expressive.

Not only is it famous for actually performing HTTP requests, but it is widely considered a seminal example of excellent API design.

You'll see quite a few Python libraries that aspire to emulate this quality of API design, often adopting Requests' tagline: "XXXX for humans"

It's not, and I think it's older than Node.js.