D vs Go on reddit

[Nick Sabalausky]

"spir" <denis.spir at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.1424.1297260589.4748.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> On 02/09/2011 02:01 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Walter Bright"<newshound2 at digitalmars.com>  wrote in message
>> news:iicfaa$23j7$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fdqdn/google_go_just_got_major_win32_treats_now/c1f62a0
>>
>> You'd think that things like JS, Haskell, LISP and Java circa v1.2 would
>> have taught people that extreme simplicity/orthogonality is a stupid way 
>> to
>> design a language that's intended to be used in the real world. But 
>> people
>> keep flocking to that silver bullet anyway.
>
> Yop! this said, I recently read (no pointer, sorry) about a possibly 
> interesting third way: making the core language as close to orthogonal as 
> possible w/o making the rest difficult, then build compromises as sugar 
> layers around (syntactic & semantic).
> This may be, actually, more or less close to how some actual languages are 
> actually constructed; but I find that making this principle intentonal and 
> intentional totally changes the whole approach. Also think this well fits 
> the design of PL with a main/core paradigm/style (not so for D, probably).
>

Yea, that seems to be the direction that post-v1.2 Java ended up taking. 
Still too little, too late, IMO, at least in the case of Java, but it may 
not necessarily be a bad idea.

Although I do like the inverse approach that D ended up taking: Don't bother 
with simplicity/orthogonality at first, just get important features in. 
*Then* refactor the internals to shuffle the complexity into the std lib and 
simplify the core language. (And, of course, use lowerings whenever 
appropriate.)

Funny though, right after I posted "You'd think that things like JS...", the 
obvious devil's-advocate counter-argument occurred to me: "You'd think that 
things like C++ and Algol would have taught people that complex languages 
are a stupid way to go." Oh well.