alt Hacker NewsOne way to bifurcate the world is that there are people who tend to restrict options to prevent misuse vs. people who tend to enable options to the positive uses easier. I fall in the latter camp. Preventing errors by restricting options also prevents positive uses that make life better.
We get to choose what approach we take. I prefer the "give them the rope they might need" philosophy. If they hang themselves, oh well.
I agree, engineering is all a series of tradeoffs, and tradeoffs can go one way or the other.
That said, I have yet to see anyone ever say "Oh man, this programming/configuration/data transfer language would be so great, but I wish they hadn't supported comments!" I see the opposite about JSON all the time.
And I don't see this about other features, e.g. Go specifically decided not to support the ternary operator, and while some folks may like that feature, I think more folks really appreciate that with Go there is generally a "standard" way to do things and it doesn't give you a million different ways to essentially do the same thing.