It strikes me that the core question here may be one of the
division of labour. The person best suited to signing up for an
ongoing commitment to maintain a whole load of different
libraries across platforms/settings will only by the chancest
fluke be the person who is suited to and enjoys writing bindings
to these libraries in the first place.
There certainly is a large part of value in that last polishing
effort that makes it not just easy, but a pleasure to install
outside libraries. That surely must be one of the things that
has worked to Python's advantage.
Beyond pip, numpy itself, and the anaconda distribution, Python
makes it super easy for the user who is perhaps capable but
inexperienced with the language ecosystem to get started. And
quick wins are addictive once you start. Perhaps D's market is
different, but I wonder if something could be learnt and applied
to the different situation of D.
[For example see Christopher Gohlke's work on building scipy
module binaries here:
http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/]
There are many fewer people in the ecosystem with D, which is why
we are talking in the first place. I suppose if we don't have
the people then money will help, and I would guess a little would
go a long way. I am not in a position to provide this kind of
support today, but hope to be so in a couple of years or so.
But I certainly think the idea of making the whole experience
much easier and more quickly gratifying might be one worth
considering. (I am sure Russell will correct me on the details).
Laeeth.
