> Corollary: every simple subset of language contains missing features dearly needed by someone else.
This could even be said about larger languages, though. If Rust committed to pleasing everyone, it would have an optional garbage collector, lifetime annotations would be optional, and there would be an interpreted runtime available as an alternative to the compiler. Those are features that some people do dearly need for some tasks. There's a point where you have to stop and put limits on what the language is actually for and what it's not. It seems to me that much of the push to add async/await in the first place was from people who really should have been using Go, Java, or Node, but wanted Rust to be their "everything language." It's okay to say, "This language is for writing performant systems applications. It's not a fullstack language for writing a webapp."
This could even be said about larger languages, though. If Rust committed to pleasing everyone, it would have an optional garbage collector, lifetime annotations would be optional, and there would be an interpreted runtime available as an alternative to the compiler. Those are features that some people do dearly need for some tasks. There's a point where you have to stop and put limits on what the language is actually for and what it's not. It seems to me that much of the push to add async/await in the first place was from people who really should have been using Go, Java, or Node, but wanted Rust to be their "everything language." It's okay to say, "This language is for writing performant systems applications. It's not a fullstack language for writing a webapp."