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CPAN was roughly contemporary, and about at the time when "downloading" became an option. But on the general notion, I'd vehemently disagree. Not having stuff
by mhd 4y ago
CPAN was roughly contemporary, and about at the time when "downloading" became an option.
But on the general notion, I'd vehemently disagree. Not having stuff in your standard library but spread about is one of the worst things the languages in this generation copied from C++. Give me a good standard library. Maybe factor out the UI and definitely truly adjacent packages like Obliq.
Note that a huge library also didn't hurt Java too much. And there it was even worse, as you had to distribute most of it as a runtime, whereas a compiled language usually gets by with less (take this with a grain of salt, I don't remember how huge Modula-3's equivalent to MSVCRT was back then on Windows, for example).
- ajb 4y agoAt the time I'm thinking of, late 90's, python, which had a decent std library, was easily installable, but SRC m3 definitely wasn't - at least on a cheap student sized machine. I seem to recall that he successor projects like CM3 tried to produce pared down versions. All this of course pales into insignificance against the amount of crap something like Android Studio downloads today to build a trivial app. But at the time, I think it was a lot. The HD I went to uni with was only 40MB, for example.