What Makes A Programming Language Good

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Tue, 18 Jan 2011 12:07:21 +0200, Christopher Nicholson-Sauls  
<ibisbasenji at gmail.com> wrote:

>> That doesn't scale anywhere. What if you want to use a 3rd-party library
>> with a few dozen modules?
>>
>
> Then I would expect the library vendor provides either a pre-compiled
> binary library, or the means to readily generate same -- whether that
> means a Makefile, a script, or what have you.

Why?

You're saying that both the user and every library maintainer must do that  
additional work.
Why should the user care that they have to deal with pre-compiled  
libraries in general?
The only thing the user should bother with is the package name for the  
library.
D can take care of everything else: check out the library sources from  
version control, build a library and generate .di files. The .di files can  
include pragmas which specify to link to that library. There are no  
technical reasons against this. In fact, DSSS already does most of this.
AFAIK Ruby takes care of everything else, even when the library isn't  
installed on your system.

> Forgive me if I misunderstand, but I really don't want a
> language/compiler that goes too far into hand-holding.  Let me screw up
> if I want to.

So, you want D to force people to do more work, out of no practical reason?

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