Lambda the Ultimate

Joe Armstrong(of Erlang) while reviewing Elixir(Ruby like language that compiles to Erlang Virtual Machine) states his Three Laws of Programming Language Design.

• What you get right nobody mentions.
• What you get wrong, people bitch about.
• What is difficult to understand you have to explain to people over and over again.

Some language get some things so right that nobody ever bothers to mention them, they are right, they are beautiful, they are easy to understand.

The wrong stuff is a bitch. You boobed, but you are forgiven if the good stuff outweighs the bad. This is the stuff you want to remove later, but you can’t because of backwards compatibility and some nitwit has written a zillion lines of code using the all the bad stuff.

The difficult to understand stuff is a real bummer. You have to explain it over and over again until you’re sick, and some people never get it, you have to write hundred of mails and thousands of words explaining over and over again why this stuff means and why it so. For a language designer, or author, this is a pain in the bottom.