I believe it's actually quite a bit harder to apply the "principle of least power" in practice than it is to recapitulate Fortran in some fashion. Programming l

I believe it's actually quite a bit harder to apply the "principle of least power" in practice than it is to recapitulate Fortran in some fashion. Programming languages boil down to type system + syntax + runtime + libraries, and many libraries could be generalized to languages if we wanted, but languages themselves have trouble supporting other languages because you're reinventing the tooling, so you lose track of types and syntax and ability to debug the runtime, and that produces a cliff of negative productivity that makes it hard to justify anything but the "big" language. Although, if we had first-class support for "runtimes talking to each other", that might change, and the whole spectrum of protocols along those lines from the OS-level pipes and sockets up through SOAP or REST suggest that we are trying really hard to come up with a right way of doing it.