What Makes A Programming Language Good

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Tue, 18 Jan 2011 07:20:56 +0200, Walter Bright  
<newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:

> http://urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2011/01/18/what-makes-a-programming-language-good/

So, why do users still get a scary linker error when they try to compile a  
program with more than 1 module?

IMO, sticking to the C-ism of "one object file at a time" and dependency  
on external build tools / makefiles is the biggest mistake DMD did in this  
regard. Practically everyone to whom I recommended to try D hit this  
obstacle. rdmd is nice but I see no reason why this shouldn't be in the  
compiler. Think of the time wasted by build tool authors (bud, rebuild,  
xfbuild and others, and now rdmd), which could have been put to better use  
if this were handled by the compiler, who could do it much easier (until  
relatively recently it was very hard to track dependencies correctly).

-- 
Best regards,
  Vladimir                            mailto:vladimir at thecybershadow.net