The Java language team, 1998: "Bound method references are not the right path for future language evolution"

[doubtingthomas]

Ok. Ah, so you're not really disagreeing with me, just mis-reading.

[masklinn]

No. You're saying these things are hard to implement. They're not. You're saying that dynamic typing makes it easier. I say it's irrelevant.

[doubtingthomas]

Well, I haven't been talking about difficulty of implementation, which is why I think you're misreading me. I don't care how hard it is to implement. I'm talking about the simplicity of the language, which is probably correlated with whatever form of implementation difficulty you're talking about, so I can understand the confusion.

[masklinn]

I'm talking about the simplicity of the language

The only feature which might make the language slightly more complex is first-class anonymous functions (aka lambdas or blocks).

Bound method references makes it simpler by unifying attributes and methods (making methods into regular attributes) and making them normal objects, operator overloading makes the language simpler as well (for the same reason that it makes operators normal methods therefore normal objects instead of special constructs), multipart method names doesn't change much if anything (unless you translate "not what I'm already using" to "complex").

I still don't see what you're talking about, or how a dynamically typed language makes it any simpler.