@neauoire @eris Ah yeah, "Growing a Language". It's a great speech, but it's not such a great description of Java. To me it reads more like a love letter to Scheme, which Steele worked on before his Sun days.

If you want to have a standardized language that allows for broad compatibility and direct code reuse between different programming teams, then I agree with Steele -- there are certain features that you simply must put in the language core, because otherwise every programmer will invent their own and collaboration will be a mess.

Scheme has had an ongoing, 30-year holy war concerning just how big to make the language core. So I wouldn't exactly call them a success story either.

My opinion is that attempting to standardize a small extensible language misses the point. These languages are good because they're custom, not because they're standard.