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Ruby, Clojure, Ceylon: Same Goal, Different Results
snydeq writes "Charles Nutter, Rich Hickey, and Gavin King each discovered that 'simplicity' doesn't mean the same thing as they developed Ruby, Clojure, and Ceylon, respectively. 'Languages that are created with similar goals in mind may yield highly disparate final results, depending on how their communities understand those goals,' writes Andrew Oliver. 'At first, it surprised me that each language's creator directly or indirectly identified simplicity as his goal, as well as how differently the three creators and their languages' communities define what simplicity is. For Ruby, it is about a language that feels natural and gets out of your way to do what you want. For Clojure, it is about keeping the language itself simple. For Ceylon, it is a compromise between enabling the language to help, in King's words, "communicating algorithms to humans" and providing proper tooling support: the same general goal, three very different results.'"
If it gains traction, then it will have to deal with feature creep (keeping up with the new hot languages), standard library bloat, backward compatiblity, and differing interpretations of the spec by compilers and developers. Then it becomes no longer simple.
Java is the classic example. It's hard not to giggle or mutter "WTF?" when you read Sun's original positional paper claiming the language was "simple".
That's why there is no easy to explicitly do things such as pointers, gotos, and operator overloading
The reason there was no pointers was that pointer manipulations were highly machine dependent. Java emerged out of Oak and the slogan "write once run anywhere" was key to its popularity.
Goto -- came from the whole philosophy that goto leads to bad code.
Operator overloading and multiple inheritance are both examples where subtle shifts in code can lead to enormous shifts in how the compiler views the code. One of the key aspects of Java was making sure that side effects to changing code were contained.