In my experience, every technology focused on building a "simple" alternative to a long-established "complex" technology is doomed to discover exactly _why_ the other one became "complex." Also spawn at least five "simple" alternatives.
Doesn't mean nothing good comes out of them, and if it's simplicity that motivates people then eh, I'll take it, but gosh darn the cycle is a bit grating by now.
Could you provide some examples? Without having had that experience, I’m having trouble picturing a concrete example that I would be sure is of the same kind.
Nginx is probably my fav of the surviving-and-thriving ones. It still remains very distinct from Apache, but calling it simpler would be a large stretch.
Projects like qmail discovered the reason in a somewhat _harder_ manner. And yes, I'd argue Python is yet another case, as it grew _at least_ as complex as Perl.
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
- Philip Greenspun
How would you subvert Greenspun in large codebases without Common Lisp? I once used Drools the rules engine which used a dynamic scripting language on Java objects. Python could have replaced that language, with much better tooling, errors etc.
Doesn't mean nothing good comes out of them, and if it's simplicity that motivates people then eh, I'll take it, but gosh darn the cycle is a bit grating by now.