* Michael Sloan:
So in other words, the Python guys knew that an approach like Haskell Platform would never work well, and so they didn't do it. Instead they built one big excellent standard library.
But this approach causes problems. There are quite a few example where Python got things wrong and did not fix them for a long time due to backwards compatibility concerns. Examples are HTTPS with host name validation, and email parsing. The trouble is that if you get it wrong, you still have to support it for a long time (perhaps eternally) because your users want to upgrade the platform without rewriting their software. In the Haskell context, an early batteries-included version of the standard library would likely have relied extensively on strings-as-lists and lazy I/O, and the latter is somewhat controversial these days (the former is rather inefficient).