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Comment by tayloramurphy | Hacker News Reader

I mean, who doesn't love requests?

Well... maybe the people who have stopped working on it due to the mysterious disappearance of 30,000 fundraised dollars, selling paid support but "delegat[ing] the actual work to unpaid volunteers", and a pattern of other issues from other community members who have not spoken up about them.

https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kennet...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19826680

> he said his original goal was just to raise $5k to buy a computer. Privately, I was skeptical that the $5k computer had anything to do with Requests. Requests is a small pure-Python library; if you want to work on it, then any cheap laptop is more than sufficient. $5k is the price of a beefy server or top-end gaming rig.

Kenneth Reitz has probably done more to enrich my life than most anyone else who builds things. I wouldn't begrudge him the idea of a nice workstation for his years of labour. Yeah, he's very imperfect, but the author has absolutely lost me

Kenneth Reitz has been good and bad at times. And while things of his are genius level, he also has done asshole level things. But on the other hand, we get that with a lot of geniuses for some reason or another. Really smart people can be really dumb too.

It would be like saying, "Don't use Laplace transforms because he did some unsavory thing at some point in time."

Looking at this drama for a bit, I haven't seen anybody advocate for 'canceling' requests itself.

Maybe it's more like: Laplace created awesome things, but let's be fair and also put in his wikipedia page a bit about his political shenanigans.

A lot of of so-called geniuses, especially the self-styled ones with some narcissistic traits, get away with being an asshole. Their admirers have different norms for regular, boring people. I don't think that is fair or healthy for a community.

Back when the drama was fresh, there was a lot of talk about “canceling” Requests, but as often happens, everyone moved o to something else and it kinda got forgotten about with time.

It wasn't really requests that got cancelled, it was pipenv that got cancelled, about the time when Jacob Kaplan-Moss stated that poetry was good. And frankly it was Reitz's actions that directly caused pipenv to be cancelled.

I'm not defending his assholery here, but it's not uncommon in tech.

Take an asshole techie and notice they tend to have devoted fans. It's just possible that Kenneth Reitz didn't get his fan base up before he exposed his personality for who he truly was. Steve Jobs, Zuck, Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, ... were all called assholes at some point or another. Geez and those people aren't even the worst these days.

What has he built that you like using that much? Honest question, not being snarky.

I liked Requests way back when but prefer httpx or aiohttp. I liked piping for about a month when it first came out, but jumped ship pretty quickly. I'm not familiar with his other works.

I also wouldn't begrudge the guy a laptop, but I do get what the author was saying. His original fundraiser felt off, like, if you want a nice laptop, just say so, but don't create specious justifications for it.

> I liked Requests way back when but prefer httpx or aiohttp.

Those two tools are modeled after `requests`, so Reitz still has an influence in your life even if you don't use his implementation directly.

They’re pretty close, sure, but Requests itself basically models a web browser. The newer ones model newer browsers (eg with HTTP/2 and async).

It stopped accepting new features a decade ago, it doesn’t support HTTP/2, let alone HTTP/3, it doesn’t support async, and the maintainers ignored the latest security vulnerability for eight months.

It was good when it was new but it’s dangerously unmaintained today and nobody should be using it any more. Use niquests, httpx, or aiohttp. Niquests has a compatible API if you need a drop-in replacement.

I've noticed that Claude Code prefers httpx because it's typed.

I really like httpx’s handling of clients/sessions; it’s super easy to throw one in a context manager and then get multiple hits to the same server all reusing one http2 connection.

Weird! I have the opposite: I want it to prefer httpx but it always gives me Requests when I forget to specify it.

LLMs are funny.

Me, because nearly every time I see it used, it’s for a trivial request or two that can easily be handled with stdlib.

If you need it, sure, it’s great, but let’s not encourage pulling in 3rd party libs unnecessarily.

Strong agree. Pip doesn't really need Requests' functionality as far as I can tell, but the vendored transitive dependencies represent a considerable fraction (something like a quarter IIRC) of Pip's bulk. And a big fraction of that bulk (and it's much the same for Rich) at startup, even if ultimately it turns out that no web requests need to be made. Which in turn is the main reason why Pip on my machine takes longer than the https://lawsofux.com/doherty-threshold/ to process `pip install` with no actual package specified. (A process that involves importing more than five hundred Python modules, of which almost a hundred are Requests and its dependencies.)

(Of the non-Requests imports, about two thirds of them occur before Pip even considers what's on the command line — which means that they will be repeated when you use the `--python` option. Of course, Requests isn't to blame for that, but it drives home the point about keeping dependencies under control.)

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