Zig is hard but worth it

Some insiders underestimate the effort required for newcomers to build non-trivial things. I think this is because some of that complexity has to do with things like poor documentation, inconsistent stdlib, incompatible releases, slow release cycle, lack of package manager, etc. For an insider living and breathing Zig, not only aren't these huge challenges, they aren't really "Zig" - they are just transient growing pains. For someone getting started though, the current state of Zig is Zig.

I wish Zig had a polished package manager (there's one in the current development branch, but you don't as much use it as fight it). They could then move some of the less polished code into official experimental packages, helping to set expectations and maybe focus the development efforts.

It is a bit unfortunate because all of the above is a pretty tall order. We're getting to the point that new languages are expected to boil the ocean by the time they reach 1.0

The more peripheral crap I have to deal with to use your language, the less I'm likely to use it in the first place. I don't need, want or care to learn yet another idiosyncratic fragile system. Finding source tarballs is a complete non-issue, and inevitably I'm going to have to manually build things anyways to figure out what erroneous assumption a library is making about the underlying system which is causing the build to fail or the runtime to crash, so the package manager just ends up being extra steps. Without fail, that has always been my experience with language package managers.

In the pursuit of making things simpler, we're really just making them harder.

It's like `apt` or `brew` for system dependency management. It is there if you want it but you can just as well download a tar and config/make/install yourself if you want.

In many ways, it is like a standard lib. No one forces you to use it. If you prefer the simplicity of your own implementations then I see no reason why you can't just write your own.

But when you want the advantages of a package manager, and there are advantages that you may not appreciate but others do, then having a standard one built into the language feels preferable to having a dozen non-standard independently competing variations that the community cobbles together.