Unfortunate Python
Most of this I agree with, with a few comments/caveats:<p>> Easy Stuff First<p>The unfortunate part about this particular example is that subprocess's interface isn't really that well-designed, and so people resort to os.system simply because it is less complicated than subprocess.<p>> Ducks In A Row<p>I don't think isinstance is really that bad, but checking based on something's exact type is definitely wrong.<p>> Toys are for Children<p>One of the problems of a batteries-included stdlib is that you have to support it just about forever. Though I would like to note that for basic async programming Tornado is surprisingly good, and less complex than Twisted.<p>> Foreign Concepts<p>Apparently this is especially useful for scientific and mathematical computing. I can't see how it's especially dangerous since just about everyone will use list instead.