Thanks for bringing it up. I had a good read. I agree entirely with Steele! It's ironic, however, that it's written in the context of Java - he mentions just three features that would make Java growable: generics, operator overloading, and value types. We all know how it went: generics were added sometime later, but there's still no operator overloading, and value types came to the language 20 years after the talk :)