I absolutely agree with all Rob Pike says. But in practice the problem is still the trade off. How limited a language should be ? what are the features a langua

I absolutely agree with all Rob Pike says. But in practice the problem is still the trade off. How limited a language should be ? what are the features a language should absolutely have to make the life of the developer easy yet still give him some room to express himself the way he wants? I think that Go failed if one considers that trade off. Often with Go, a developer ends up doing the job of the compiler, because its flat type system doesn't allow a certain degree of expressiveness ( or worse, forces the developer to use reflection , i.e. putting aside the type system all together and using a "generic" 'interface {}' type). While C++ is something extreme in term of complexity , the other extreme, Go, is problematic as well. I've yet to find a language that has a good balance between the 2. But Go certainly showed that the tooling is as important as the language itself, and it's a great part of its success. "Philosophically" , no question, I agree with Rob Pike. On practice, things are a bit more nuanced.