Maturing a language – when do you stop adding things?

I ask the question, because there’s been a lot of debate recently. The whole debate over when you stop adding to a language and allow those around it to mature instead!

Doug Lea – http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/
As poor software engineering goals, some criticisms are valid (but it needs to be looked at in comparison to it’s modern peers), though whatever tool your given, people inexperienced in it’s application will misuse it in ways in which the originator never intended. After all, you can still bash a screw in with a hammer!

Is this also a question of how engineering has changed? A colleague recently made the comparison of how we spent childhood playing with tape recorders, taking things apart to see how they worked, and doing basic hardware hacking, and what current 10-15 year olds do and how they approach problems. They seem to be more a generation who seem to be at a loss if they turn something on and it just doesn’t work straight away – many don’t understand how to take a step back and systematically debug what is wrong. Perhaps they’ve been spoilt by the Internet, and mobile phones – the way it just works. They have no idea of the underlying protocols and the what or why they do things so have trouble reasoning based on small building blocks of information.

To quote Blackadder -

E:  Yes. He has patented a machine called "The Ravelling Nancy".

PR: Mmm, what does it do?

E:  It ravels cotton sir.

PR: What for?

E:  That I cannot say sir. I am one of these people who are quite happy
    to wear cotton, but have no idea how it works.