Interesting article on the cognitive burden of programming language features, and how it incentivises designs that are similar to today's popular languages: https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/programming_languages_and_the_speed_of_light.html
Related Posts
What are the most popular languages that have used an AST walker for their implementation?
I know Ruby used to do this, but there must be others.
(I'm interested in the lowest PL speed that users will tolerate if you have awesome features.)
What are the most interesting upcoming scripting languages? Scripting remains an important part of the programming language ecosystem.
Optimise time to first feature. Allow mutation of the running system to experiment. Interactive inspection of data.
Blogging about my programming language project: choosing the basic syntax!
https://www.garden-lang.org/blog/syntax.html