The big Python surprise: a culture of composable libraries, like Clojure

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

It is well known that Clojure has a culture best summarized as “Clojure developers prefer to assemble their own stack from small, composable libraries.”

I have been working with Python lately. I am surprised by that it also has a culture of using small libraries. There have been 2 attempts at monolithic frameworks in Python: Zope and Django (maybe Pylons, though it is done as separate libraries, sort of like Symfony2 in PHP). But for the most part, Python goes for micro-frameworks, such as Flask (comparable to Ruby’s Sinatra) and Bottle and Bobo (read about 14 Python microframeworks). These micro-frameworks use the other libraries that the Python culture is built out of, so these micro-frameworks are comparable to the lightweight frameworks of the Clojure world.

It’s also common for Python developers to pull together a bunch of different libraries, to meet whatever their current needs happen to be. This too resembles Clojure. Here is a partial list of some popular libraries in different categories:

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So, you get the idea. Lots of small libraries that are composed together into an ad-hoc framework that is suited to the task at hand. (I won’t even get into the math/science stuff, which made Python famous back in the 1990s.)

I find this surprising, because I have never heard of meta-programming being emphasized as a major part of Python, and you need a lot of meta-programming to have a culture of small, composable libraries. Developers don’t write long essays about meta-programming in Python, at least not to the extent that developers write about Ruby or Lisp. This presents us with something of a conundrum: how is it that Python manages a culture of small, composable libraries, when it doesn’t support the level of meta-programming that Ruby and Lisp support? This is a paradox.

Post external references

1
http://adambard.com/blog/sinatra-docs-in-clojure/
2
http://www.pylonsproject.org/
3
http://flask.pocoo.org/
4
http://bottlepy.org/docs/dev/index.html
5
http://bobo.digicool.com/en/latest/index.html
6
http://codecondo.com/14-minimal-web-frameworks-for-python/
7
http://jinja.pocoo.org/
8
https://github.com/defunkt/pystache
9
http://chameleon.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
10
http://www.makotemplates.org/
11
http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
12
http://scrapy.org/
13
https://pythonhosted.org/Flask-Principal/
14
http://repozewho.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
15
http://peterhudec.github.io/authomatic/
16
http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/user/authentication/
17
https://code.google.com/p/httplib2/
18
https://docs.python.org/2/library/urllib.html
19
https://docs.python.org/2/library/urllib2.html
20
http://unirest.io/python.html
21
http://werkzeug.pocoo.org/
22
https://docs.python.org/2/library/pickle.html
23
https://jsonpickle.github.io/
24
https://docs.python.org/2/library/marshal.html
25
https://github.com/dplepage/dfiance
26
http://routes.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
27
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wheezy.routing
28
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/alembic/0.7.1
29
https://flask-migrate.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
30
https://github.com/guilhermechapiewski/simple-db-migrate
31
http://www.sqlalchemy.org/
32
http://www.pythoncentral.io/sqlalchemy-vs-orms/

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The big Python surprise: a culture of composable libraries, like Clojure

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