
Show HN: Awesome Python – the go-to Python toolbox - stanislavb
http://python.libhunt.com/
======
stanislavb
Hi, mates!

I released this project yesterday. The end goal is this to become the go-to
"Python Toolbox". I believe this could become a viable place for package
discovery and comparison.

I will be more than happy to receive any feedback or ideas how the site could
be improved and become more helpful.

Thanks!

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allanderek
I like it. On python-ideas the idea of a curated list of pypi packages comes
up from time-to-time. The most recent incarnation was started just last month
and you can read it here: [https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-
ideas/2016-March/03...](https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-
ideas/2016-March/039287.html)

Such discussions usually die out after some people give their opinions on what
such a package curation/voting system should be like, whilst others state why
we should not have such a system.

For my money, most of the objections are really just people pointing out that
it is a very difficult to design problem. Rather than objecting to the actual
idea.

So anyway, it's really nice to see some actual working code.

A few of comments:

1\. You describe this as the "go-to Python Toolbox", but I'm not sure that
really describes what it is well. It's really a summary of github statistics.
Even forgetting how the packages are rated, you have a package rating system
rather than a single toolbox. I think what you have is more interesting than a
single python toolbox.

2\. You have not quite solved the major complaint that usually comes up in
discussions of such package voting systems. That is, that a package is not
generally just "good" or "bad", but appropriate or not appropriate for given
uses. Furthermore, I think the 'Popularity' metric is not quite obvious from a
first look at, say, a package category. In other words, it's not quite obvious
that this is a measure of how the github repository is starred. At least then
the user can decide themselves whether or not this is a useful metric.

3\. Github stars is not a bad measure. A better one would include the ability
to downvote.

4\. Pretty much all repulation/voting systems have the problem that for any
"votes", or even full-blown reviews, it's not clear which version of the
library they are about. This is really difficult to solve. Since you only have
positive votes the problem is not so pronounced as it is in other systems (or
proposed systems). But the basic problem is that a bunch of users downvote a
library because it is difficult to use, or doesn't have tests, or they cannot
install it etc. The developer takes that into consideration and produces a new
version of the library, what should the reputation system do? It's really not
a trivial question. You still have that issue in that a bunch of users may
have decided _not_ to star a library because of an earlier version. They may
even star a library which later becomes less useful, for example because it is
superceded by a better library, or because the code degrades. I understand
users can unstar a repository, or flock to a new one, but still, the general
problem is not entirely solved. That said, using GitHub stars probably suffers
from this problem less than other measures.

5\. I really like the look of it. I think the colour scheme for Python is the
best of the three so far.

