Surely there&#x27;s a place for technical criticism? If you think I&#x27;ve over-stepped that and made comments which reflect personally on the NLTK maintainers I&#x27;ll apologise and revise. That wasn&#x27;t my intention.<p>For a long time we&#x27;ve been in a situation where everyone experienced in NLP knows, but nobody says, that you should not use NLTK. That&#x27;s not a healthy situation.<p>Having a book as baggage explains but does not excuse how out-of-date and low-quality NLTK&#x27;s software is. The bottom-line is that in 2015 you can&#x27;t go to NLTK and:<p>a) Learn how modern NLP is done;<p>b) Access a convenient toolkit of reliable, basic NLP components.<p>That&#x27;s the mission statement, right? Well I think they don&#x27;t achieve that, and that they do a disservice by pretending they do.