"Dumbing down the language by not providing more powerfulexpressions is a way of promoting to a wider audience. However, is it the only way of supporting communites?" (From Carlos Perez's Weblog) via [Artima Weblogs]

Carlos is talking about Java, and a comment by Gilad Bracha that "[In designing a language, one] one can contrast the Scheme-like philosophy of using a small number of very general constructs, with the more mainstream approach of having a great many highly specialized constructs, as in C or Modula style languages." And the contrast is made very well in Paul Graham's Hundred-Year Language essay. There's a real language-design buzz going on in the industry right now; my brain melted last week during a 3-hour conversation with Sergei Dmitriev of JetBrains (makers of IDEA). If I were smarter, I would have learned something about "universal grammars for describing domain languages."