C-Based languages

C is an amazingly designed language.  It's beautiful, simple, elegant and fast.
Everything a well designed programming language should be.

C++ then came along and shit all over Dennis Ritchie's masterpiece.  Bjarne took a beautiful, simple, elegant and fast language. And kept shitting on it until all that was left was 'fast'.  Dennis should of beat the shit out of him for turning his work of art into an abomination.

Then Gosling came along, surveyed the turd that Bjarne had dropped, and attempted to clean it up.    He redesigned C++ to remove the crap and attain the elegance that C had.  Unfortunately, in his cleaning frenzy, he over-simplified the language and sacrificed speed.  In the name of simplicity he removed pointers, manual memory management,  generics, operator overloading and native code compilation.  A noble effort, but ultimately just as much of a failure as C++.

>>50
Lack of parametric polymorphism and polymorphic containers (except when they decide to not) and using tuples instead of a tagged union for errors are the real deal breakers.
The latter is just plain retarded.
The former is just as retarded, but it's even worse because you have to choose between useless code repetition, or (typesafe) void* casts.
Also, the asinine 32-bit GC implementation, but that's not part of the language itself.