Worse is better?

[via Digitalmars-d]

> a fascinating one-page read, he predicted that lisp would lose 
> out to C++ when he delivered this speech in 1990, well worth

Lisp has never been in the same class of languages as C++. Lisp 
gained traction in a time period when there were few 
alternatives, and it was easy to implement an interpreter for it. 
It was cool among the academic-geeks that hung at universities, 
so it gained traction among the young who looked up to them. That 
prolonged the lifespan of Lisp, but Lisp as a language has never 
been great from a usability perspective.

Worse is not better, but things tend to get worse when you add 
features to a core where the new parts does not fit and you 
insist on backwards compatibility.

The dynamics of evolving around an "installed base"…

You see this in X11, windows and the X86 instruction set too.

D should be able to a lot better, with a small installed base, 
but you probably need to delay that to D3.

And even then you have a problem when so many D users think that 
"alias this" is a good idea… It is a hack and a "worse is better" 
design. In order to avoid such constructs you need to think about 
the semantics of the language in a more "axiomatic" manner.