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The Rule of Least Power leads people to lock themselves into low-power languages, only to find that they need more power, which leads to extending the language
by kentonv 10y ago
The Rule of Least Power leads people to lock themselves into low-power languages, only to find that they need more power, which leads to extending the language incrementally to support incrementally more power, which inevitably leads to a mess. Most heavily-used file formats (even "config" formats) eventually evolve into turing-complete languages, but inevitably they are bad languages, because they were not designed with this end-state in mind.