Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: > To be even marginally effective in a language, you must have some > understanding of it all. That definitely isn't the case for libraries.
I disagree because assuming a point of view, that is high (or low) enough, all programming languages only have a very small indispensable core. This is because turing-completenes suffices to show the effectiveness of a programming language. Only the elements of the language needed for that proof build the indispensable core of the language. Every other elements can at least be classified into - helpers for humans to write and read, or - hints for the target machines on how to perform efficiently, or - (syntactic) sugar for (informal) proofs of correctness and therefore can be put into libraries. -manfred
