It's still a vastly simpler language than pretty much any other widely used language out there. Consistency is superseded by pragmatism in the language design.
Because of the decades of things not displacing it - when someone suggests "oh we'll just do it simpler" they often are not seeing the forest for the trees.
Simpler languages have been shipped dozens if not hundreds of times, and they generally tend towards expressing the things they missed or not giving enough functionality for the things they missed.
I am not saying its impossible, but you're going to have to do a lot more than hand waving to justify the reverse position.
Those three flaws are brought up repeatedly because they are a sad regression from the current state of the art in programming language construction. It could've been a much nicer language with very little effort, but its designers chose not to do so.
At the risk of inviting a flame-war, it's distressing to me that a language this recent, with such a purported focus on simplicity, has design-problems this fundamental
I don't like people pretending that the language is simple, and commenters berating other languages for being complex while the language they promote and defend has quite a few of complex things and awkward workarounds for no reason.
Some of those features are just some fancy libraries, or syntactic sugar that you can ignore, if you want to. They don't make the language itself more complicated.
reply