> a language core should be small but flexible; despite the power and complexity of Scala libraries, Scala's language specification is much shorter than Java's

> a language core should be small but flexible; despite the power and complexity of Scala libraries, Scala's language specification is much shorter than Java's Looks like GrǬǬvy, also begun in 2003, went the other way, making its language grammar larger but its core methods small. Beginning with a clone of Java's grammar, they expanded it with lots of extras, see http://svn.codehaus.org/groovy/trunk/groovy/groovy-core/src/main/org/codehaus/groovy/antlr/groovy.g http://svn.codehaus.org/groovy/trunk/groovy/groovy-core/src/... And for the core methods http://groovy.codehaus.org/api/org/codehaus/groovy/runtime/DefaultGroovyMethods.html http://groovy.codehaus.org/api/org/codehaus/groovy/runtime/D... (note the methods marked "deprecated" still actually exist but were repackaged into other classes for Groovy 2.x).