And of course, standard library APIs age with time. Perl and Python are good examples. Both ship with packages that were really good in their day, but have long since been superceded by community-created tools. But the core has to keep shipping the old thing for backwards compat and the maintainers are reluctant to add yet another package that does the same thing.

Dependencies have their downsides, but being able to assemble the best of what's out there rather than relying on the best of what was available at some point in the past has a lot of advantages too. Languages with good dependency management seem like the best possible option.

Go's refusal to embrace this is a huge pain point. Dep is a decent start, but without a community actually doing things like releases, changelogs, and all the other things that go into a solid ecosystem, it's a half measure at best.

Go has indeed embraced it and is working on `dep` the officially sanctioned dependency manager.

It's under the official golang github repository.

https://github.com/golang/dep/graphs/commit-activity

Agreed that it's a decent start, however I disagree with the lack of releases. If you look at the git history there is a lot of activity in it.

I've found some legitimate bugs[1] in simple functions that don't give me a ton of confidence in it either.

Personally I find the standard libraries in the likes of Python and .NET Core much more comprehensive, intuitive, and reliable.

[0]: https://golang.org/pkg/time/#Time.Format [1]: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15852

It's sure not perfect, and it's impossible to please everyone but I think it was worth the experiment.