Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]
This talk has a lot of very weak points. He made the claim that more features hurt readability (~6:10), because when you are reading you have to waste time thinking about why the programmer chose the set of features he did to write the code. To make that kind of claim without qualifications is just ridiculous - if it were true, why add any feature to a programming language at all? Especially if one believes readability is the most important thing in a programming language, which Rob Pike says he does. It may be true that <i>some</i> features hurt readability, but it is obviously not the case that all features hurt readability for all people all of the time.<p>It is also strange that he makes so many claims about readability, considering it is the most subjective attribute of a programming language there is. For example, some code that would have been completely unapproachable to me a couple of years ago is perfectly readable to me today, because I've learned new concepts.