Now that I’m back from vacation, I’ll answer the implicit question Adam asked in his post about less powerful languages:

Perhaps that is what Curtis is really aiming at: a powerful language that enough people can be good at.

That’s close. I don’t want a less powerful language, but I do want one without a steep learning curve, and in fact, one where you can ignore the more abstract parts unless you really need them. There’s more to it than that, though: each language makes some things easy and some things hard. I want a language where the things that our developers need to do often are easy, and the hard things are things they rarely need to do.