[rastignack]

They didn’t add quite as much features as Java has. Not even by a mile.

[pjmlp]

Wait until they reach Java's market size and years.

All established languages either grow features, or wither and die.

[jjtheblunt]

I think your assertion overlooks the role of a language's standard library.

C seems pretty much a counterexample; sure, it's added a few spec changes since ANSI C or C89, but C is essentially stable.

[pjmlp]

Only if you ignore all the compiler extensions, that everyone that doesn't care about reading the standard, thinks are part of C.

Get ready for K&R compatibility removal on C23, with improved generics, type inference and lambdas probably landing on C26.

C is actually a good example, given that it shares authors with Go, which at the time also decided to ignore what systems programming languages have been doing since 1958 outside Bell Labs.

[erik_seaberg]

C was barely feasible on a PDP-11, so I can forgive it a lot, but we can afford powerful languages now that CPUs are thousands of times faster while brains are pretty much the same.

[jjtheblunt]

What do you mean barely feasible? C is basically a slightly abstracted/elevated syntax with a particular calling convention on assembly language, and PDP-11 is just a computer (that i remember too).

[erik_seaberg]

I’m under the impression that the speed and memory of their PDP-11 were barely enough to run their C compiler, considering that Emacs was considered a heavyweight app and S-Algol had to target a virtual machine instead of native code.