I admire the compactness and power of Smalltalk. What advice would you give language designers looking to keep the cognitive load of a new language low? What was your design process like, and would you do it that way again?
What kinds of learning do you want your prospective programmers to go through? It's what you know fluently that determines cognitive load. In music you are asking for an answer in a range from kazoos to violins.
The main thing a language shouldn't have is "gratuitous difficulties" (or stupidities).
That said, it's worth thinking about the problems of introducing things in our culture today that even have the learning curves of bicycles, let alone airplanes ...
Or ... what is the place of tensor calculus in a real physical science?
