Does D have too many features?

[Era Scarecrow]

On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 21:19:00 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 10:07:54PM +0200, q66 wrote:
>> On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 20:04:11 UTC, Walter Bright
> The whole point of a standard library is that if somebody has  
> written
> that code before, and it's general enough for everyday use, 
> then you
> shouldn't need to download this, install that, configure the 
> other,
> before you can use it. It's a major plus if you're publishing 
> code to be
> able to say, just download my sources and compile it with the 
> language
> standard library and it will all work. As opposed to, if you 
> want to
> compile my code, you need library X and Y which depend on W and 
> Z, all
> of which have to be downloaded from different places all over 
> the 'net
> and you better make sure you get the right versions otherwise 
> everything
> will break.

  OMG I love you :)

  A long time ago when I began programming I came to a distinct 
conclusion that anything I write has to be able to compile and 
just work with only the standard library. I don't want to make 
people go out of their way to get this or that.

* If you have something that requires multimedia, then fine a 
library will help.
* If you have to have something that does translations between 
other languages and makes sense, then use it.

  But for everything that's just basic work processing and 
otherwise, there is no reason you should have an external library 
used. Need compression? If the standard library (like C) doesn't 
include something, then what do you choose? LZMA? lzop? 
gzip/zlib? bzip2? Depends on how heavy duty you need. If a basic 
compression is included then you will use it unless you REALLY 
need the extra speed or compression ratio.

  "Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler." -- 
Albert Einstein