Well, perhaps the usual suspects can get another infoworld self-promotion article out of it.
In these decisions the only thing that matters is if Microsoft, Facebook, Bloomberg or one of their employees is pleased.
This pain generates job security for the bigcorp employees and grief for anyone else.
If I'm on the right path with these forum threads, it looks like there were issues with how Debian packages python?
https://forum.freecad.org/viewtopic.php?t=67985
https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/pull/6753
https://ffy00.github.io/blog/02-python-debian-and-the-instal...
> ... [Here] are the numpy.distutils features that are not present in setuptools:
* Nested setup.py files
* Fortran build support
* BLAS/LAPACK library support (OpenBLAS, MKL, ATLAS, Netlib LAPACK/BLAS, BLIS, 64-bit ILP interface, etc.)
* Support for a few other scientific libraries, like FFTW and UMFPACK
* Better MinGW support
* Per-compiler build flag customization (e.g. -O3 and SSE2 flags are default)
* a simple user build config system, see site.cfg.example
* SIMD intrinsics support
* Support for the NumPy-specific .src templating format for .c/.h files
The basic REPL causes serious problems for beginners, and the differences in this REPL are (intentionally or not) largely geared towards fixing those problems. Most notably, beginners can't reliably paste in code examples from tutorials. Either there's a use of `input` which eats the next line of code as interactive input, or a blank line inside a block which the REPL interprets as end-of-code (causing the rest of the block to report `IndentationError`s despite being correctly indented for the intent of the code). They also commonly get tripped up by `help` and `exit` being Python callables rather than REPL commands, and get put off by the lack of built-in screen clearing. (Historically - as it turns out from forum discussion - the Python devs have expected that people actually quit the interpreter with ctrl-D/ctrl-Z, and clear the screen with the terminal emulator's functionality for doing so.)
Yes; it's extremely cruft-filled and nobody wanted to / had the skills to keep the standard library version maintained. There's a note in the Setuptools documentation somewhere about how distutils was deemed fundamentally unfixable, and it doesn't come across like the hacks Setuptools was applying on top of distutils were particularly well understood by anyone.
>In these decisions the only thing that matters is if Microsoft, Facebook, Bloomberg or one of their employees is pleased.
I don't think there's good evidence for this, and the current case is certainly not convincing. Why would they want distutils removed - as opposed to that motivation come from the devs who would otherwise be responsible for its bugs?
These days anything is justified by the hypothetical needs of beginners, the same people who are used and incited by the Python ruling class to flag posts and report people on discuss.python.org, in the same way that Mao operated in the cultural revolution when he felt his power waning.
The "small annoyances" are only small to you because you have spent at least a few days on this.
Countless questions on Stack Overflow that were caused by these problems, but closed because experts couldn't reproduce the problem and/or beginners couldn't describe it clearly, beg to differ. I've encountered scores of them myself and always despaired at not having a proper canonical to route them to. Some of the better attempts include https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2589309 and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5025920.
For that matter, an analogous issue with IPython (so it clearly doesn't fix everything) resulted in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43189302, which has almost a million views. And then there's the problem in Visual Studio Code whereby command-line Python invocations end up dumped into the Python REPL that VSC opens: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51540391 .
>and you could use the included IDLE anyway.
My experience with IDLE was that, because it was implemented using Tkinter, it would cause all sorts of subtle threading issues when I tried to develop Tkinter programs with it. Its REPL also edits text the same way as a text editing window - so there's no nice keyboard shortcut for command history, and you can put the insertion point in places that aren't the current prompt. (With current versions, this appears to just disable typing temporarily, and also the `>>>` prompts get a separate column. My recollection is that it used to be considerably less pleasant.)
But sure, pasting works properly. It also doesn't let you deliberately type an empty block (invalid syntax; see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1528903), unless you deliberately delete the automatically inserted whitespace. (The traditional REPL couldn't insert that whitespace because it would mess up copy-paste even more.)
>the same people who are used and incited by the Python ruling class to flag posts and report people on discuss.python.org
They aren't doing it because of beginners' hypothetical "needs". They're doing it because of beginners' hypothetical feelings. How they expect people to phrase themselves, or what proactive gestures they might expect towards "inclusivity", have absolutely nothing to do with their ideas about what mistakes beginners commonly make or what mindset is leading them there.
I am, by my reckoning, currently about the third-last person on the planet you should be engaging with this line of rhetoric (after Tim Peters and David Mertz - I don't know enough about Steve Holden to say). I lived the situation you're appealing to - and I'm also still reading discuss.python.org even though I can't post there, along with curating Stack Overflow, posting on Codidact etc. I also (though I don't usually talk about it) used to moderate the r/learnpython subreddit. It's very easy for experienced programmers to lose sight of the actual needs of beginners. But I'm doing everything I can to be more aware.
Mostly by not using it at all.
REPL doesn't maintain a state, atleast not complex enough state to be relevant to most things. People only use it for hello world kind of demo and don't touch it ever again.