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suppose I'm just old enough to have been raised on the "small is beautiful" philosophy, and I still hold in awe some languages built from a relatively spare set of primitive concepts: Forth, Smalltalk, Scheme, C and the Unix shell + utilities + pipeline all come readily to mind. But recently, I've had some time on my hands and spent some time "swimming" about in the programming language space. A few observations. Some of our modern languages (some a decade+ old already) have type systems that require a PhD to understand fully. We have a low level threading model in languages like C and Java that almost require a PhD to use effectively in any sufficiently complex system. (Not to make a fetish of the PhD.) In Pike's Power Point on system research, recently posted in another thread, he mentions, IIRC, that 80% of the Inferno (?) effort was spent conforming to existing, externally imposed standards! Turning to the most mainstream, popular, *production* languages - we have TRULY giant libraries that boggle the mind. Designing an effective GUI library for the modern, newly more complex UI was a grand challenge of the late '80s and early 90s.