You're really missing the point. Logo was super simple and we learned it in elementary school as children, that's all that I'm talking about. And those other languages have accreted way too many features to be simple enough.
I got your point. I think it is you who is missing mine:
> You're really missing the point. Logo was super simple and we learned it in elementary school as children
You wouldn't have learned conditionals and other such things though. That stuff wasn't as easy to learn in LOGO because LOGO is basically a LISP. eg
IFELSE :num = 1 [print [Number is 1]] [print [Number is 0]]
vs
if { $num == 1 } then { print "number is 1" } else { print "number is 0" }
or
if num == 1:
print "number is 1"
else:
print "number is 0"
I'm not saying these modern languages don't have their baggage. But LOGO wasn't exactly a walk in the park for anything outside of it's main domain either. Your memory of LOGO here is rose tinted.
> And those other languages have accreted way too many features to be simple enough.
I agree (though less so with Lua) but you don't need to use those features. Sure, my preference would be "less is more" and thus my personal opinion of modern Python isn't particularly high. And Perl is rather old fashioned these days (though I think modern Perl gets more criticism than it deserves). But the fact is we don't need to reinvent the wheel here. Visual Basic could make raw DLL calls meaning you had unfettered access to Win32 APIs (et al) but that doesn't mean every VBScript out there was making DLL calls left right and centre. Heck, if you really want to distil things down then there's nothing even stopping someone implementing a "PythonScript" type language which is a subset of Python.
I just don't buy "simplicity of the language" as the reason languages aren't often embedded these days. I think it's the opposite problem: "simplicity of the implementation". It's far easier to load a JSON or YAML document into a C(++|#|Objective|whatever) struct than it is it to add API hooks for an embedded scripting language. And that's precisely why software written in dynamic languages do often expose their language runtime for configuration. Eg Ruby in Puppet and Chef, half of PHP applications having config written in PHP, XMPP servers written in Haskell, etc. In those kinds of languages, it is easy to read config from source files (sometimes even importing via `eval`) so there often isn't any need to stick config in JSON documents.
