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> Any tool which is old enough will have a thousand ways to do something.

Only because of the strange desire of programmers to never stop. Not every program is a never ending story. Most are short stories their authors bludgeon into a novel.

Programming languages bloat into stupidity for the same reason. Nothing is ever removed. Programmers need editors.

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So how do you design a language that accommodates both the people who need a codebase to be stable for decades and the people who want the bleeding edge all the time, backwards compatibility be damned?

You don't. Any language that tries to do both turns into an unusable abomination like C++. Good languages are stable and the bleeding edge is just the "new thing" and not necessarily better than the old thing.

C++ doesn't try to do that. It aims to remain as backwards compatible as possible, which is what the GP is complaining about.

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