Timon Gehr:
http://xkcd.com/552/
What better alternative do you suggest in practice? The only better solution I remember that was used for a language design is the ":" added to Python after some controlled experiments done on users.
Relying on experimental correlations (if the analysis is done well) seems sometimes better than the usual beers&intuition-based ways most language features are chosen and designed :-)
Currently a group of people are trying to design a language pushing to the extreme the idea of design by committee, it's future a peer reviewed language meant to be used for scientific programming. I've taken a look at its syntax and I was not happy with the current work in progress.
Bye, bearophile
