On Nov 10, 2007, at 11:57 , Jason Johnson wrote:

> When you go
> mainstream then you have people with some stupid reason they need just
> one more operator, precedence level and so on.  People came to Java to
> avoid the complexity of C++, but all the people that caused that
> complexity came along too and soon Java will be worse then C++ ever
> was.

One could argue that if you set out from a restricted environment,  
you can only enhance it by adding complexity. That certainly is what  
happened - Java advocates always laughed about C++ templates, and now  
they have them too as generics, because you actually need them in  
that system to be expressive.

If you start with a powerful simple model, the urge to extend it is  
much smaller - see Lisp or Smalltalk, you can basically do anything  
you want within the system.

> I understand Tim's (and countless others) point about career
> opportunities, but if Smalltalk became the language of choice for
> sitting in a cubicle in a huge organization grinding out the same
> meaningless, boring code year after year, would that be a victory?

Does anybody here still subscribe to the idea that Smalltalk should  
be a system in particular for non-experts? That certainly was its  
original motivation. It also has largely failed in that regard,  
though not necessarily so on technical reasons.

- Bert -