[OT] Why software ends up complex

[Bruce Carneal]

On Friday, 18 December 2020 at 15:10:18 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Wednesday, 16 December 2020 at 07:51:14 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>> Once complexity is there, nothing can be done with it, so 
>> there's no problem to solve. But you can reduce complexity by 
>> not having the feature in the first place, that's the 
>> difficult part.
>
> Programming languages are different. What matters most is what 
> they underlying language looks like (when you remove 
> syntactical sugar). If the underlying language is clean then 
> you can always set up a new syntax that can be used together 
> with the old one.

Yes.  What matters is simplicity as accurately perceived by the 
reader of the language and, to a lesser extent, simplicity as 
perceived by the compiler writers.

Language augmentations, unarguably, make a language 
implementation more complex but they can also make the language 
simpler to use correctly.