I've worked a long time in a completely different vein, under the premise that language design should focus on making programs manageable. Making them shorter certainly promotes that in many respects, but destroys it in other respects. And the notion of "making the creation of programs easier" is to me, the completely wrong premise. That ends up being a wonderful derivative of making them manageable, but should never the goal. Programs are easy to create in BASIC, for example. They're just not scalable, which is another way of saying they lack manageability, which is something that only shows itself as the system's complexity expands. To paraphrase Alan Kay, you can build a doghouse with cardboard and plastic, but you couldn't build a house like that.