[inoop]

> Great so let's just leave all of the legacy terribleness in it. Let's not address all the quirks and horribleness that sounded like a good idea at the time. Let's not let the language evolve.

Nobody is saying that. The golden rule of API design is do not break your customers.

The way you let a language or API evolve is by introducing a new API. For example, instead of changing the semantics of count() you might introduce len() and then try and not fuck it up this time.