When Dylan is called "complex," there doesn't seem to be an appropriate distinction being made between "complex to implement" and "complex to use." Dispatching on multiple arguments, for example, seems actually simpler in concept than a specialized rule like you can only dispatch on one argument.

Stroustrup has a fairly lengthy discussion of multiple-argument dispatch or "multi-methods" in his book, _The Design and Evolution of C++_. He rejected them "with regret," because of difficulty in implementation, not because of any problems that he felt would arise with use. The recent adoption of run-time type information, he says later in the book, would make the implementation of multi-methods more feasible.

Scott E. Fahlman

Dylan's syntax is more complex than Common Lisp's, but that's because Dylan's designers thought it would make Dylan easier to learn and more familiar to programmers who have worked in other programming languages or who are already comfortable with infix notation for arithmetic.

Dylan's macro system will be more complex than Common Lisp's, but the goal is to make it easier and safer for average programmers to do simple things. Lisp macros are very elegant and powerful, but often require very deep thinking on the part of the programmer to keep all the levels straight and make everything work reliably.