What Makes A Programming Language Good

[Lutger Blijdestijn]

Vladimir Panteleev wrote:

> On Tue, 18 Jan 2011 12:10:25 +0200, bearophile <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> Walter:
>>
>>> http://urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2011/01/18/what-makes-a-
programming-language-good/
>>
>> It's a cute blog post. It suggests that it will be good to:
>>
>> Getting Code:
>> 1) Have a central repository for D modules that is easy to use for both
>> submitters and users.
> 
> Forcing a code repository is bad. Let authors use anything that they're
> comfortable with. The "repository" must be nothing more than a database of
> metadata (general information about a package, and how to download it).

I'm pretty happy that my Fedora repositories are just a handful, most of 
which are setup out of the box. It's a big time saver, one of it's best 
features. I would use / evaluate much less software if I had to read 
instructions and download each package manually.

>> - D code in such repository must Just Work.
> 
> This is not practical. The only practical way is to put that
> responsibility on the authors, and to encourage forking and competition.

True, though one of the cool things Gregor did back the days with dsss is 
automagically run unittests for each package in the repository and publish 
the results. It wasn't perfect but gave at least some indication.