[Afforess]

I am really rather tired of the appeal to simplicity that is often made in language design. Simplicity is not a virtue in a programming language. Consistency is a virtue, but not simplicity.

Simplicity is a tradeoff that takes away power and control from the programmer and gives it to the computer. Computers don't need to be more powerful, programmers do. The tradeoff is a poor one and rarely worth the little gained.

In this case, what do we gain by not adding primitive value types in Java? The fact that you sleep better at night because the language is more "clean"? Why should we want that? Sleep is definitely important, but the idea that a language can be too complex is silly.

It does matter that new additions do remain consistent with the overall architecture, but there is no reason to advocate less features simply because you find the idea of learning something new disconcerting.

[eropple]

Agreed. I feel like a C# Stan in here at the moment, given how often I'm speaking glowingly of it lately--I use it to make games but my day job is Ruby and Scala!--but you can look at C# to see what moderately progressive (not even "aggressive") iteration on a language to add more and more powerful features in a smart, clean way would look like. Nobody's complaining about C# having too many bells and whistles, honest.

[Retra]

I really agree with you as well, but I can think of a few reasons to want simplicity.

First, including features that you expect others (beginners) not to use is problematic. You can't really claim to know a language if you can't read other people's code when they are using standard language features. So you have to learn all those features whether you intend to use them or not. And learning them means knowing when and why they are used. Usually, this kind of stuff is just deferred to libraries and language extensions. (Haskell-style Langauge extensions and Python's future imports are a wonderful idea, I think.)

Second, people like to get comfortable in their languages. If the C language designers just said "Hey, er..., you know all these curly b's are unnecessary, let's drop 'em in the next standard," people wouldn't care for it. More features + more power + backwards compatibility can only carry you so far before it becomes downright unwieldy.

I don't think people learn very well that they should just forget everything they know every 5 years and start on mastering something completely new. The problem is not in the language being too complex (like you said,) but in our culture and habits. People don't like complexity. That's why we work so hard to make it go away.