title: How big should a language vocabulary be?
body: <p>I started looking at the upcoming <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B0x" rel="nofollow noreferrer">C++0x specification</a> today, and I started thinking on what is the right size for a language vocabulary. Initially, it struck me as very annoying that new keywords were introduced. At some rough level, the number of keywords in a language is, I think, an estimate of its complexity. That is, in the case of C++, adding new constructs would make it even harder to master the language. Thats one reason why the K&amp;R book is so much smaller that the C++ equivalent.</p>
  
  <p>After that, I thought about natural languages, whose vocabulary has been shown to grow linearly with time, regardless of the language (*). The only exception is, of course, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Newspeak</a>, which says a lot. The vocabulary size in this case is related to the expressive power the language.</p>
  
  <p>In programming languages, however, you can have very expressive languages with a small vocabulary size (ie, Lisp).</p>
  
  <p><strong>So, to phrase this is a question, what, in your opinion, should a language vocabulary be - big and verbose or small and concise?</strong></p>