On 3/30/2011 3:23 PM, Walter Bright wrote:Having a package installation system would be a great addition to the D ecosystem, but somebody has to write and maintain such a system. Until that happens, we have to settle for something a little more modest. Right. I agree a good package system would be useful for niche stuff. Having basic functionality that most other modern languages include in their standard library provided by add-on packages is a bad idea, though, no matter how easy they are to install. Basic stuff that most programmers will need sooner or later needs to be: 1. Just there, with zero effort. 2. Not designed by committee with tons of overlapping/duplicated functionality. There needs to be some kind of unifying vision. 3. Well-indexed with all the API docs in one place and good cross-references to each other, so that they can be browsed. I'm speaking from my experience with the R programming language here. It has an outstanding package management system. This is useful for niche stuff, but results in everyone and their kid brother creating slightly different ways of doing the same thing, makes the API documentation impossible to browse from a centralized place (this makes the ecosystem much harder to learn) and makes you constantly have to remember whether package X is installed on the computer you're currently using. |
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