> there are some obvious things that could be done to greatly improve it [...] it could be so much more As with much of programming language design and impleme

> there are some obvious things that could be done to greatly improve it [...] it could be so much more As with much of programming language design and implementation over the last 3+ decades? below> that could have been mitigated or entirely avoided by surveying best practices Yes, people who would spend their time working on language designs and implementations, should at least be familiar with the many surveys of best practices. Surveys of repos, type systems, memory layout, parallelism, and so much else. Language choices are intertwined and subtle, and adhocery has enormous downstream costs to the field and to society. The programming language design and implementation wiki exists for that reason. To accessibly distill our collective experience. Not using these resources is negligent - a disregard of our profession's responsibilities to society. Oh, wait. Our field can't be bothered to create surveys of best practices. Or a wiki. Knowledge is inaccessibly dispersed among balkanized and siloed human communities, assorted academic papers, and scattered code. Shall we continue to blame pervasive failure on individual language developers and tools? For how many more decades? At what point do we start addressing it as a systemic problem? :) So I agree with your observation, but suggest the problem extends far beyond package management systems.