Counterpoint: Python format strings. (I think there’s four or five different built-in ways to do those now.) Python’s “batteries included” may have helped it to win vital audience early on, but it’s also locked in a ton of deadweight that’s seriously slowed down its own evolution since, while bloating its feature complexity to such a level I could not recommend Python as a good language for beginners now.

Which suggests there’s a more general meta-problem waiting to be solved here: how to [automatically] mass-migrate code written against interface A when a superior successor B comes along. I have many gripes about Apple’s #SwiftLang, but seriously appreciate that this is one requirement they’ve given some thought to. Having seen the decade-long logistical horror of Python’s relatively minor 2-to-3 upgrade, Xcode’s ability to auto-update projects written for one Swift version to another has let them evolve the language with minimal pain.

And while I’m not a fan of Lisp itself (a decent first attempt that should’ve been vastly bettered by now), I think its metaprogramming model an obvious foundation for such an automated migration system. Thus, rather than bake in all the libraries, keep the libraries external and build in a standard mechanism for migrating codebases written for one onto another. In essence, automated refactoring by “recipes”, where these recipes are as common and easy-to-use as the libraries themselves.

..

Of course, this still leaves the other (larger) problem of how to sort out current trash houses like PyPI, NPM, LuaRocks, et al, where contributors’ enthusiasm is not necessarily matched by their knowledge, competence, and ability to savagely critique their own work before inflicting it on the world (you know, the “Science” bit in “Computer Science”). Preferably without destroying that enthusiasm in the process, since there’s no point having a wonderfully polished platform without bums on seats as well—a perennial Lisp failing, it should be noted.

This is not merely idle speculation on my part. Many years ago I cut my teeth on AppleScript, which makes the stdlib-starved Lua look like fat Python 2, and tried to bootstrap a library ecosystem for it more than once. Good practice. Zero success†.

And now I’m trying to devise a “stealth Lisp” successor to them all (https://github.com/hhas/iris-script), I realise cracking the greater library problem is what will make the next generation of languages. A platform is only as robust and dependable as its weakest component, and for as long as a buggy or withdrawn left-pad function can tip the whole stack over then it’s not robust at all.

But this is as much a sociological challenge as a technical one, and not one I’ve got answers to yet.

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† After which I realized it’d be far easier just to port the useful bits of AppleScript to Python instead. Which almost worked too… but that’s another story.