This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Do we need more, or less? Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Chris Petrilli has a cogent observation in the comments to this post from Ralph Johnson:

That's the trouble with what's going on in the curly bracket world of programming. People want to play with the language, where as Smalltalk and LISP are so simple as to allow you to do almost anything you can imagine, use any paradigm you can dream of, make any bizarre control structure you could ever want, without changing the language. Whether it be the pure messaging syntax of Smalltalk, or LISP Macros (which are even more powerful than people can imagine), you can do just about anything. Why are people so obsessed with a new language? New does not, by default, equal better. It simply is new. Different. People built cars with all kinds of weird transmission designs, push buttons, etc., but eventually everyone figured out that one design worked better. The problem is that all the other languages are trying to to catch up with Smalltalk without realizing that they don't need to ADD features, they need to take stuff out.

Sometimes, Less really is More...