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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Personally, I’m a big fan of simplicity and minimalism in programming language design. I think that smaller languages have the potential to be easier to implement, optimize, teach, debug and understand.

Citation needed.

Python is a popular first / teaching language and it has as many (and probably much more in 3.5) features as JS.

And Scheme is supposedly simple, but not that popular with any large amounts of people, beginners included.

There are features that interact in mysterious ways and can be difficult to master (C++ has a lot), and features that are mostly orthogonal (e.g. template strings don't complicate anything related to arrow functions and vice versa).

What I'd like to see, with regards to Javascript, is for "strict mode" to extend to the correction of old, long standing warts (e.g. crazy coercion rules etc). But I guess with this new shared "bytecode" for the web announced, we probably wont have this problem for long.

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Why does someone need to provide citation for expressing their opinion on something that's even so obvious as "I think simple things are easy to teach and understand, etc.". Do you think complex languages are simpler to teach, debug, optimize, and understand?

>Do you think complex languages are simpler to teach, debug, optimize, and understand?

Obviously yes, I do think it, and I gave an example.

Or rather, I think that number of language features is not related to how easy it is to teach, debug, optimize and understand.

Python has tons of features (maybe even more than ES7 for which he laments) and yet it's an easy to teach and understand language.

And inversely, C is succint and has few features, but it's complex to teach and debug.

One key insight it: a language might be big, but you don't need to use all of its features (or even teach them all).

You can start someone with basic Python, for example, without delving into async or metaclasses and he can still do tons of stuff. Contrast with the "simpler" and much smaller C, in which he needs to understand pointers (a tricky subject) in order to even use the standard library.

A second insight is: a language might be big, but its features could be orthogonal and easy to understand in isolation, not the "features subtly affecting each other" mess C++ is.

The author has clearly framed these as personal opinions, which as we all know, everyone is entitled to.

Not in technical disussions: in these you only get to have arguments.

Or rather, you can still have "personal opinions" but without arguments backing them are of no use to anybody and you might as well not state them.

You know, it's possible to have a conversation without having an argument. It is possible to listen to others. Not everything in life, or indeed on Hacker News, is a debate to be won. Sometimes we're just sharing our human experience.

> I think that smaller languages have the potential to be easier to implement

> Citation needed

Uh huh.

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