There is an expression, Linux isn’t free it costs you your time.

Just because someone said it does not make it true and certainly, I don’t have to live after that expression. It kind of is a catch all phrase to justify (or not to justify) everything. It could also be used as an argument for “Vibe Coding” (I hate that term…).

I mean this argument about Linux does not apply to every single application (you apply it right now here to some random Python script). In example Windows, MacOS, Android, nothing is free and costs you your time. The question is, how you want spent your time. And I enjoy writing programs and scripts for various reasons.

I personally think reinventing the wheel is great. Why? It makes you learn and do it. It makes you less dependent. The end result might not be the most polished one, but also if nobody reinvents the wheel, then we have no competition. Sure you should not reinvent everything, there is a balance act to make. And this balance is different for everyone else.

BTW, I’m not saying the way I am going and doing this is the right one. In the end I use additional packages when needed, BeautifulSoup as an example to make life really easier. But that is something specific to that script. Stuff like click and argparse is more than a single script, because when I switch to click then all my future scripts would depend on it. And I feel more comfortable with a solution that is already built-in (stdlib) if its not too bad.

I don’t see click as a required package that I really need. And that is also true for many other packages, such as requests one.

I use external packages for compiled languages. For scripting languages like Python, it makes it ab it harder to use. Because people are forced to install dependencies. I don’t like that (unless its a shell script, but that is by its nature a dependency hell).

And for Python, I usually deliver the script as a single .py file, without requirements or special instructions, no typical file structure as well. And your argument just because other popular packages use a specific library does not mean I have to use it too. I don’t care what libraries other popular packages use, at least in context to my program / script.

It supports both and depending on the situation its more procedural or more object oriented. Do you consider the standard library as part of the language and are you forced to use it? Then certainly the object oriented parts of the language would be forced to use and therefore it is object oriented. Or do you only evaluate the language and its features itself? In that case, Python supports object oriented programming with classes and objects, but you are not forced to use it.

Are we talking about the language features itself or the produced programs with it in the real world?

So regardless if you look at the language itself or the common standard library that most Python programs use, objects and classes are an part of the language. Even if you write simple procedural scripts, does not take away that Python itself is a more object oriented programming language.

Nice. There is a reason why the standard library of Python does not get rid of optparse. optparse was I think marked to be removed in the future, but its no longer deprecated and will stay in the library.

Click looks good and I would have looked in more detail. The problem to me is, it is a dependency. I usually write and try to write Python programs without external library dependency, unless it is absolutely necessary (like GUI or BeautifulSoup). Click “might” be a better alternative, but it is “only” something that does it a little bit better. This is not a reason for me to use an external library.

BTW, you can also have a short description instead suppressing the option. In example:

parser.add_argument(
    "-s",
    "--sort",
    action="append",
    help="sort all game items by value of chosen key, before filter, *multi"
    if advanced_help
    else "sort all items",
)

instead hiding the option, with --help the short description "sort all items" is listed, while the advanced help would then show the long help. Just an additional thing with the above technique is possible.