Einfachheit vs Kompliziertheit

Anzahl der Seiten der Referenzdokumentationen ausgewählter Programmiersprachen:

Perl 1067

Common Lisp > 1000

COBOL 810

C++ 776

C 554

Java 544

Fortran 77 430

PL/I 420

Eiffel 300

Pascal 120

Scheme 50

Oberon 20

``The most important decision in language design concerns what is to be left out.'' Niklaus Wirth, Autor von Pascal, Modula-2 und Oberon.

``Small is beautiful. Small is powerful. Small is easy to understand.'' Guy L. Steele Jr., in seinem Vorwort zu einem Buch über Scheme.

``And to the minimalists in the crowd, Perl seems like a pointless exercise in redundancy. But that's okay. The world needs a few reductionists (mainly as physicists). Reductionists like to take things apart. The rest of us are just trying to get it together.'' Larry Wall, in seinem Vorwort zu ``Programming Perl''.