alt Hacker NewsYes! I've never been against languages with batteries included. In fact nowadays I prefer them. It's one of my biggest issues with Rust, but the problem also exists in Haskell. Funnily enough, in Node.js, which gave birth to npm, you can now do many stuff without external dependencies (last one I've seen are the sqlite functions).
But yes, in languages with batteries included sometimes they feel like an afterthought. It's not just Python. Java also used to have a big standard library, with many useful things including GUI programming which has been neglected a little bit.
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The trick is, when shipping a new language having a batteries-included std lib is hard to do: what should you select, what is considered good (enough), how much time do you spent on it. This detracts from what most languages try to be. An exploration in novel language/compiler paradigms.
With node, what happened is that it was left to the ecosystem to grow good packages/batteries. Same with golang (see the uuid lib example from 1.27 the other day).
To bridge the gap you could have the language/platform declare some “blessed packages” or even “blessed packages and their versions for each release of the language”.
> Java also used to have a big standard library, with many useful things including GUI programming which has been neglected a little bit.
Swing was replaced with JavaFX, then JavaFX was removed from JDKs. Long live Swing! But yes, it's extremely nice to have a GUI library out of the box.