Article discussing Go, could well be D

[Lutger Blijdestijn]

Caligo wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 6:06 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu
> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
>> That's it. We need a package management expert on board to either revive
>> dsss or another similar project, or define a new package manager
>> altogether. No "yeah I have some code somewhere feel free to copy from
>> it"; we need professional execution. Then we need to make that tool part
>> of the standard distribution such that library discovery, installation,
>> and management is as easy as running a command.
>>
>> I'm putting this up for grabs. It's an important project of high impact.
>> Wondering what you could do to help D? Take this to completion.
>>
>>
>> Andrei
>>
> 
> Andrei, I have to respectfully disagree with you on that, sorry.
> 
> D is supposed to be a system programming language, not some scripting
> language like Ruby.  Besides, the idea of some kind of package
> management for a programming language is one of the worst ideas ever,
> specially when it's a system programming language.  You have no idea
> how much pain and suffering it's going to cause the OS developers and
> package maintainers.  I can see how the idea might be attractive to
> non-*nix users, but most other *nix OSs have some kind of package
> management system and searching for, installing, and managing software
> is as easy as running a command.

For software libraries it is a different case imho, for the following 
reasons:
- for most software development needs, not enough libraries get packaged by 
the major distro's
- there's no way library authors are going to maintain packages of their 
libs for all the popular distro's with their incompatible systems
- distro maintainers often package older versions, sometimes they are years 
behind
- most, if not all native package management systems deal poorly with the 
need for having several versions of a library available. So there is still a 
need for tools like virtualenv. With dsss it's also trivial to setup 
multiple installations to manage version requirements
- language specific package management can span across operating systems

The net result is that languages which have package managers (python, ruby, 
haskell, perl and now also .net) have in fact far more and up to date 
libraries available than any distro will ever be able to manage.