In the interests of social anthropology, I feel compelled to point Pythonistas at this fascinating discussion on the stdlib-sig on adding argparse to the Python stdlib. (Yeah, it's pretty much the only traffic that list got so far this month.)

Fascinating stuff. If there's a secret cabal out there masterminding Python development, they are clearly rather poorly organized ;)

--titus

Legacy Comments

Posted by Kevin Teague on 2009-09-12 at 02:09.

In a dark corner of bar in the outskirts of Paris, classical music is
playing from the period of the French Revolution. The buxom waitress
delivers a couple stout buxom beers. The python secret cabal sip their
beers slowly, waiting until the waitress is out of earshot.    Guido:
"Are you sure you weren't followed?"    Brett: "Absolutely. I wore the
hunchback disguise again. It's brilliant, no one could recognize me."
Guido: (folding his fingers together) "Excellent."    Brett: "Alright,
let's plunk argparse into the standard library."    Guido: "Why?"
Brett: "Those Perl folks have had a tough time of it lately,
especially since we released Python 3 already. If we put argparse into
the standard library, we'll have three ways of parsing command-line
arguments. I'm hoping that Simon will finish of optfunc, and we can
put that in there later too and bring the count up to four."    Guido:
(chuckling) "They'll accuse of TIMTOWTDI! That'll be good for a laugh.
Let's do it, it'll give them something to talk about on reddit. At
least we won't have to read endless arguments about US health care
reform for one day ..."    Brett: (firing up emacs) "Alright, let's
get to work then. Time to make it look like there's a discussion
taking place on stdlib-sig."    Guido: "This is my favorite part.
Nobody suspects our secret cabal since we just forge a bunch of phony
discussions. The appearance of a choatic open source development
community is the perfect disguise for our cold, calculating changes to
the  Python standard library."    Brett: "Your Warsaw e-mail
impersonations are spot on."    Guido: "You do a good Foord
impersonation."    Brett: "I love how you do the all of the Cannon
impersonations though, that's the best - you sound just like me!"
(both let out a deep belly laugh, they raise their glasses to a toast,
then all is quiet except the furious sound of typing)