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The contrast between simple and complete languages was best (imho) expressed in Guy Steele's convoluted 1998 OOPSLA talk, Growing a Language. The whole talk is

• jasode 11y ago
  I'm familiar with that talk and it's a good one but Guy Steele's main thesis is not showing the difference between small/simple and large/complex. Instead, his main point is that a successful language can start small and it is inevitable[1] that it will grow into a larger one. Therefore, let's plan on its growth from user feedback. To help the thinking, he defines a sort of "meta framework" for the directions a language can grow. The idea is that the growth can be more systematic instead of a random chaos of adding keywords and syntax (e.g. PHP). My message is orthogonal from Steele's. I'm saying that evangelizing that a "language X is simple" in terms of a formal language spec is not useful to real-world programmers. The working programmers actually care about holistic simplicity/complexity that combines Formal specs and Informal idioms. [1](my description not his because he used 1-syllable words)