Worse is better?

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 10/9/2014 5:36 PM, deadalnix wrote:
> Is this the politically correct wy to say "we don't care about
> simplicity anymore!" ?

If simplicity was the overriding goal, we'd settle for the simplest possible 
language that was Turing complete.

The problem, however, is that what makes a language simple to comprehend also 
tends to make writing programs with it complicated!

For an analogy, when I was younger I had a set of hand tools to do everything 
with. I couldn't afford a more complete set. Not having the right tool for each 
job meant approximating it with some other tool. I'd get the jobs done, but at 
the cost of much extra time invested, and crummy results.

Such as I could never get a square cut on a piece of wood. Now, I have a sweet 
miter saw that quickly and accurately cuts wood every time. Of course it is a 
far more complex tool than a handsaw, but much simpler to actually get work done 
with.

So it's not that we don't care about simplicity anymore. We care about what is 
simple for the programmer to get complex work done quickly and accurately. I 
like to think of D as a fully equipped machine shop, where the programmer 
doesn't have to make do with inadequate (but simple) tools. As professional 
programmers, isn't that what we really care about?