[smithbits]

My quest for languages that say "Yes" ended with assembly. I started in BASIC and found the strait jacket it imposed much too restrictive. Then Pascal was the big teaching language but it has it's own ways. It wasn't till I got good as x86 assembly that I felt totally in control and able to do things just the way I wanted. Having achieved that feeling 20ish years ago I've been running away from it ever since. C and C++ proved that at some size of code base even the most brilliant programmers can't do memory management correctly[1] so I love that modern language said "No" to memory management. I've worked at large software companies where the programming style guides ran to 80+ pages. That's 80 pages of documentation of how people will format their code so that it's done consistently. I love that Python said "No" to letting people format their code however they wanted. It's likely that these aren't the kinds of things that Steve Yegge is talking about, but there are a lot of things it's worth saying "No" to, and if they bug you (like they used to bug me) there's always assembly language.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/70226/tr-2005-139.pdf