What makes this quote really interesting is that Wirth was Martin Odersky's (guy who designed Scala) PhD advisor!
Scala is a very simple language at its heart. Unfortunately that empowers developers to write really complicated libraries, leaving application developers in much the same place as if they were using a language with complicated features. (Most application developers can't even tell the difference - most complaints about "Scala is a complex language" turn out to be "I was using a complex library in Scala")
Implicits are responsible for most of Scala's complexity whether you grok them or not.
Niklaus Wirth designed and implemented the languages Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon of which the last one is the smallest.
This reminded me of a great blurb about Niklaus Wirth's approach to languages:
>Wirth’s philosophy of programming languages is that a complex language is not required to solve a complex problem. On the contrary, he believes that l languages containing complex features whose purposes are to solve complex problems actually hinder the problem solving effort. The idea is that it is difficult enough for a programmer to solve a complex problem without having to also cope with the complexity of the language. Having a simple programming language as a tool reduces the total complexity of the problem to be solved. [0]
[0] Pg.2 http://www.cslab.pepperdine.edu/warford/ComputingFundamental...