A little known awesome Python module

Via my constant companion, the programming reddit, the other day I came across a blog post by Doug Hellmann about a Python module named cmd, which contains one public class you can subclass to really easily make awesome command-driven programs in Python.

Reading about cmd, I thought it looked really awesome, couldn't wait to use it, and was incredibly jealous that this Hellmann guy had thought of writing such a useful module before I had. It would have been a fairly easy but really useful and respectable bit of free software to have produced.

Then, reading the first comment on the post, I realised that I had misunderstood entirely what this was. cmd wasn't a third party module that Hellmann had written and released. It was a part of the Python standard library that Hellmann was simply describing. This thing, this awesome thing, has been in Python since version 1.4, which was released last century, and before I had done any programming in anything other than Commodore BASIC 2.0, before I had any idea what Unix was. As far as I personally am concerned it may as well have been the first thing Guido ever wrote.

In all my years of Python usage, I've never heard of cmd or seen it used! Heck, I own a dead-tree copy of the O'Reilly book Python Standard Library and flip through it occasionally while waiting for the kettle to boil, or whatever, and I've never seen it in there. I see now that of course it is in there, but I never came across it in my random walks through that book, nor in any of the other Python books or blogs I have read. I am really astonished. This is something that should be much better publicised.

On an unrelated note, the anti-spam questions I discussed setting up in my last entry have completely eliminated the Russian spam problem! Rock on.