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"Batteries included" means "ossification is guaranteed", yah. "stdlib is where code goes to die" is a fairly common phrase for a reason.

There's clearly merit to both sides, but personally I think a major underlying cause is that libraries are trusted. Obviously that doesn't match reality. We desperately need a permission system for libraries, it's far harder to sneak stuff in when doing so requires an "adds dangerous permission" change approval.

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The goal is not to cover everything, the goal is to cover 90% of the use cases.

For C#, I think they achieved that.

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> They are going to be out of date whenever a standard changes (HTML, etc.)

You might want to elaborate on the "etc.", since HTML updates are glacial.

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The HTML "Living Standard" is constantly updated [1-6].

The PNG spec [7] has been updated several times in 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2025.

The XPath spec [8] has multiple versions: 1.0 (1999), 2.0 (2007), 3.0 (2014), and 3.1 (2017), with 4.0 in development.

The RDF spec [9] has multiple versions: 1.0 (2004), and 1.1 (2014). Plus the related specs and their associated versions.

The schema.org metadata standard [10] is under active development and is currently on version 30.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... (New)

[2] https://web.dev/baseline/2025 -- popover API, plain text content editable, etc.

[3] https://web.dev/baseline/2024 -- exclusive accordions, declarative shadow root DOM

[4] https://web.dev/baseline/2023 -- inert attribute, lazy loading iframes

[5] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... (Baseline 2023)

[6] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... (2020)

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPath

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework

[10] https://schema.org/

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please! nobody uses Xpath (coz json killed XML), it RDF (semantic web never happened, and one ever 10years is not fast), schema.org (again, nobody cares), PNG: no change in the last 26 years, not fast. the HTML "living standard" :D completely optional and hence not a standard but definition.
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glaciers change faster than HTML
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Oof, I honestly hadn't considered that.
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Why would they be out of date? The ecosystems themselves (for example .NET) receives regular updates.

Yes, they cannot include everything, but enough that you do not _need_ third party packages.

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Python, .NET, and Java are not examples of batteries included.

Django and Spring

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And in fact wasn't a popular Python library just compromised very recently? See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47501426.

So Python's clearly not "batteries included" enough to avoid this kind of risk.

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That's my point. You can have a large standard library like those languages I mentioned, but that isn't going to include everything nor cover every use case, so you'll have external libraries (via PyPi for Python, NuGet for .NET, and Maven for Java/JVM).
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comparing to Node, .NET is batteries included: built-in Linq vs needing lodash external package, built-in Decimal vs decimal.js package, built-in model validation vs class-validator & class-transformer packages, built-in CSRF/XSRF protection vs csrf-csrf package, I can go on for a while...
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Python's standard library is definitely much more batteries-included than JavaScript's.
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