Right, I'm agreeing with you a lot, except that you seemed to be a bit against some of the things Kernel does, and I was pointing out that Kernel does that because it's trying to guide you toward a certain way of thinking that (hopefully) results in better programs. Whether you agree with Kernel's guidelines or not is another story.

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"Instead, for consistency's sake, Kernel advocates for library writers to write non-naive algorithms, ultimately making library-writing more of a chore."

Library-writing already is a chore. If the only libraries available are hacky semi-broken things, then why would I use them? I can just write my own hacky semi-broken program faster than it would take to understand the library (usually).

So one of the primary benefits of libraries is that you can put a lot of extra effort into it, and then people use the top-notch shiny awesome library so they don't have to put all that effort into getting things perfect. Kernel just seems to embrace that and try to make even the core language itself rock-solid.

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"This is totally a "worse is better" line of argument, so I don't expect to convert you with it so much as to convince you the ideals aren't so clear-cut."

I am generally an advocate of "worse is better", or else why would I be using Arc? When discussing Arc, I do tend to have a "worse is better" attitude about it. But at the same time, I also care about "doing the Right Thing", so my thinking shifts when talking about Kernel.

Essentially, Kernel seems to me to be a marvelous language that embraces the "do the Right Thing" attitude, whereas Arc seems to be a marvelous language that embraces the "worse is better" attitude. I like both of them, they have different atmospheres and feelings about them.

So, I think it really does depend on what you want to do, what you expect out of a language, etc.

I must say, though, Kernel has captivated me recently. I'm a total sucker for minimalism and elegance, while at the same time caring about speed and practicality. Inner conflict!

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"unless you mean all the perhaps-not-so-dangerous things John Shutt considered dangerous when writing the R-1RK"

I was being hand-wavy and meaning things similar to hygiene breaking, like the 2nd and 3rd things on your list of things you mentioned in your post. So, not necessarily all the things John Shutt considered dangerous, but certainly some of them.

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"Maybe G3 becomes something like this [...] I might actually support a G3 worded this way"