> I would rather have N language features of increasing complexity/UX issues for dealing with increasingly complex situations rather than one mechanism to rule them all that can fail to instantiate in all cases (of whatever complexity). That’s the tradeoff that I want.
It's not that that single mechanism can fail in all situations. It's very unlikely to fail to compile in situations where the complicated language always compiles, and more likely to fail to compile when used for more complicated things, where macros may fail to compile, too.
It's probability of compilation failure is about the same as that of C++ templates [1]. Yeah, I've seen compilation bugs in templates, but I don't think that's on any C++ programmer's top ten problem list (and those bugs are usually when you start doing stranger things). Given that there can be runtime failures, which are far more dangerous than compilation failures and cannot be prevented, that the much less problematic compilation failures cannot always be prevented is a pretty small deal.
But okay, we all prefer different tradeoffs. That's why different languages choose design philosophies that appeal to different people.
[1]: It's basically a generalisation of the same idea, only with better error messages and much simpler code.
It's not that that single mechanism can fail in all situations. It's very unlikely to fail to compile in situations where the complicated language always compiles, and more likely to fail to compile when used for more complicated things, where macros may fail to compile, too.
It's probability of compilation failure is about the same as that of C++ templates [1]. Yeah, I've seen compilation bugs in templates, but I don't think that's on any C++ programmer's top ten problem list (and those bugs are usually when you start doing stranger things). Given that there can be runtime failures, which are far more dangerous than compilation failures and cannot be prevented, that the much less problematic compilation failures cannot always be prevented is a pretty small deal.
But okay, we all prefer different tradeoffs. That's why different languages choose design philosophies that appeal to different people.
[1]: It's basically a generalisation of the same idea, only with better error messages and much simpler code.