[aaron-lebo]

You're right. That may be a poor example given that their forte isn't software. I don't believe the process is very different, though.

To give another example: I don't think users really want Ruby's parser to be 10k lines of C or whatever, whether they directly know that or not. Nobody really wants to maintain that, nor do people really want to think about corner cases it causes. They do want a beautiful and expressive syntax, though, which can be achieved by cutting a few features. You can write an almost Ruby parser, or something better, in 500 lines and I'm not exaggerating.

If that's happening at the development level, then it's happening everywhere.