Well, at least in this case, gavinking's protests were utterly unnecessary because I didn't attack the language (despite his beliefs to the contrary) so there was no need to defend it. I just wanted to clarify its clearly stated, official design goals, and later (after being called lots of names) also asked why the language designers think those goals are the right ones to address, because on the face of it, they appear to be the wrong ones to me. It is, of course, a matter of pure opinion and outlook, but still, it is interesting to hear the designers' views (especially because a new language is generally something that makes a much stronger statement -- ideological, philosophical -- than most developer-facing software products. Even if gavinking thinks I have misunderstood Ceylon's treatment of generics or the quality of the Java interop, those topics were really not the core of my statements, but rather Ceylon's basic raison d'etre.