I can’t believe I’m relishing the weather today when it’s just above 40 degrees. But that’s how it goes deep in the heart of winter in New York. Weeks like these make me think of this xkcd and how the weather extremes here in the summer and winter are pretty close to the worst of both worlds. Oh, well! The buildings look pretty at night at least.

This is a short Weekly this week. Let’s get on to it!

• An explosion of transitive dependencies (Phil Eaton): I feel like pushing languages to have comprehensive standard libraries is admirable, but I did disagree with Phil on some of the details here — specifically that Parquet support should be part of a standard library alongside JSON and CSV. Parquet might be an emerging standard, but it’s a binary format with lots of small features an edge cases. Its own reference implementations in Java and C++ don’t always agree on how to populate some of its metadata and statistics.

  Including functionality in a standard library tends to stifle competition outside of the stdlib. A stagnating Parquet implementation would be pretty dangerous for language.

• The Mythical IO-bound Rails App (Jean Boussier): An interesting rebuttal to the use of Ruby and Python in web development that spells out how “the database is the bottleneck” can hide some important details.