Languages are a way to communicating both to other humans and to your compiler, and doing both well is really hard. Sometimes syntactic sugar makes it easier fo

Languages are a way to communicating both to other humans and to your compiler, and doing both well is really hard. Sometimes syntactic sugar makes it easier for humans even in powerful and dense languages: think of the "do" notation in Haskell. And no, you can not put every language "feature" in a library: what about features like static typing, isolation of side-effects... Even features like threads can be a library, but the compiler has to know about this library and its particular semantics... So yeah, we all know languages like Lisp or Smalltalk are very expressive. But current C# is also quite powerful and relatively pleasant to work in, and it's goal is rather to bring more features to programmers and to evolve this "blub". And of course I hope someday the average programmer will write in a Haskell-like-but-even-better language :)