It saddens me to see how misguided some groups attempt at language creation are. Contrast these 2 quotes: (greatest/least) "To be clear, in most programming la

It saddens me to see how misguided some groups attempt at language creation are. Contrast these 2 quotes: (greatest/least) "To be clear, in most programming languages, these functions would merely be called max and min. But in SQL, those names are already used for aggregate functions. Since there is no syntactic difference between normal functions and aggregate functions, you have to pick two different names." "After 2-3 years the language had grown by accretion.... Eventually I found it was shrinking, once you look at enough different applications you come to general notions, these generalizations allowed me to take out whole chunks of special things and furthermore the general ideas are usually much simpler to understand than the special cases." The easiest path for someone creating a language or API is to add a new layer/function for everything. It solves the immediate problem, it allows you to create something new, it can't break existing code. As a java programmer I often find myself creating an abstraction layer without thinking. What's made this much worse actually is google and stackoverflow, people can't google general solutions but they can google for "convert php string to camel case". However when I look at beautiful implementations of languages, they are beautiful in their exposed simplicity.