Re:Programming languages, operating systems, despair and ang...
by emanuelez on Monday June 30, 2014 @02:49PM
(#7966805)
I guess that's what attracted people to Python some ten years ago, as opposed to Perl. One can be sure that CPAN has a Perl library fit for your needs, but having such features in the standard library makes a big difference for a newcomer.
The same could be said in the devops context with Ansible vs Chef/Puppet. Ansible joined the game pretty late, but it's attracting a lot of users because of its "batteries included" philosophy. But this battle is still ongoing and only history will tell us the winner.
Re:Programming languages, operating systems, despair and ang...
by ef4 on Monday June 30, 2014 @05:59PM
(#7967997)
> having such features in the standard library makes a big difference for a newcomer.
And not just for the newcomer. The biggest benefit is that your dependencies and your dependencies dependencies can all compose better when they're all using the same standard implementation of feature X.
The extreme case of this problem was c++ in the bad old days when lots of organizations were writing their own String libraries. Inevitably, you'd add a dependency that pulled in yet another incompatible string implementation.
If you’re coming up with a brand new language, you have to do a damn good job of compensating for it by piggybacking on existing VM/Libraries/third-party tools (which Swift largely does), building it in your language and standard lib (e.g. Ruby), or doing a good job at attracting a new community to build that for you.