Simplicity vs Complexity

Number of pages of various programming languages standards or reports:

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 concern what is to be left out.''
Niklaus Wirth, author of Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon

``Small is beautiful. Small is powerful. Small is easy to understand.''
Guy L. Steele Jr., in his foreword to a book about 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 his preface to ``Programming Perl''