Thanks! A big part of the project was discovering all of those philosophical sort of trade offs. Going in, I had a naive idea that I could figure out the “perfect language” for me that expressed exactly how I thought. I have a ton more respect for language maintainers now, even when they make decisions I disagree with.
Every now and then the "programming as theory building" article shows up on HN. Language design is even closer to theory building, as it's awfully easy for two superficially unrelated features to interact in an inconsistent way.
(see also Joel Moses on "beautiful crystal structure" vs "ball of mud")
