[Python-Dev] Re: If you thought there were too many PEPs...

[Fredrik Lundh]

greg wrote:
> I've heard from several different sources that when Guy Steele Jr was
> hired by Sun to help define the Java language standard, his first proposal
> was that the length of the standard be fixed.

    "C. A. R. Hoare has suggested that as a rule of
    thumb a language is too complicated if it can't
    be described precisely and readably in fifty
    pages. The Modula-3 committee elevated this to a
    design principle: we gave ourselves a
    "complexity budget" of fifty pages, and chose
    the most useful features that we could
    accommodate within this budget. In the end, we
    were over budget by six lines plus the syntax
    equations. This policy is a bit arbitrary, but
    there are so many good ideas in programming
    language design that some kind of arbitrary
    budget seems necessary to keep a language from
    getting too complicated."

    from "Modula-3: Language definition"
    http://research.compaq.com/SRC/m3defn/html/complete.html

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