Vision for the D language - stabilizing complexity?

[Patrick Schluter via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 10 July 2016 at 02:44:14 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Saturday, 9 July 2016 at 08:39:10 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Seems that in order to make it useful, users had to extend it. 
>> This doesn't fit the criteria.
>
> Scheme is a simple functional language which is easy to extend. 
> Why would you conflate "useful" with "used for writing complex 
> programs"?
>
> Anyway, there are many other examples, but less known.
>
>> Wirth's Pascal had the same problem. He invented an elegant, 
>> simple, consistent, and useless language. The usable Pascal 
>> systems all had a boatload of dirty, incompatible extensions.
>
> I am not sure if Pascal is elegant, but it most certainly is 
> useful. So I don't think I agree with your definition of 
> "useful".
>
Original Pascal was useless. You could not even have separate 
compilation, there were no strings (packed array of chars of 
fixed size two arrays of differing size were not compatible, so 
impossible to write a procedure or a function without defining 
them for all possible packed array sizes). It became useful 
thanks to the extensions added by UCSD (units) and the by Turbo 
Pascal (strings).