It's interesting to note that Google has taken the deliberately opposite approach with Go: small syntax, learn 90% of the language's ins-and-outs in a few weeks, so that the average fresh college grad Googler (average tenure being less than 2 years, IIRC) spends as little time as possible ramping up and has relatively predictable output.
https://dave.cheney.net/2017/06/15/simplicity-debt https://dave.cheney.net/2017/06/18/simplicity-debt-redux
And slowly, the language is expanding in very obvious conclusions.
Personally, I think there needs to be a balance in a language, where it should not be too restrictive in its syntax, but on the other hand, it should not be overly complex and has too much syntax. I am on the fence with Swift, but it does seem to come on the complex side.
Just pointing out that syntactic edge cases can make writing easy, but most of programming (beyond one-off scripts) isn't writing. See: Scala and C++. Companies using these languages in production frequently disallow entire subsets of syntax or language features because they're hard to maintain.
Balance certainly is key.
With your large project, in hindsight would you prefer Go or C++? At least with C++, you can go as complex as you want, or stop and set some "rules" that should not be passed. But I err on the side of having the option rather than being restricted.
I'd say Swift is probably harder to learn than it could be because of how much syntax for common features has changed over major releases.
I have a feeling like the computer world is being torn between two extremes - either go all-out complex or "think of the children" simple approach. Not just in programming languages, but in software development in general. If forced to pick out of those two, my personal preference would be the complex, but I would like to see a middle ground of "moderate" technologies.
People are only beginners for a (hopefully) short time, then they're not. Making things better for them in the post-beginner period is far more advantageous, since that's when the vast majority of productive work occurs.
There is certainly a place for beginner-friendly languages. People need to learn to program at some point, and something which is aimed at helping them do that is really useful. But there's no reason that it should be the same language used by professionals to do real work.
Imagine changing the design of a 747 to make it easier to fly for new pilots. We wouldn't dream of doing such a thing. The cockpit of a 747 is for experienced professionals. If you're learning to fly then you belong in the cockpit of something like a Cessna 152.
Note that I'm not advocating for difficulty just for the sake of difficulty, and I don't want to keep people out. And if a language can accommodate beginners without making things worse for professionals then let's go for it. But it shouldn't be a major goal of most languages.
I was already doing C++ for MS-DOS while at the technical school (15-18 years old) and learned OOP via Turbo Pascal 5.5 and 6.0 before getting into C++.
Just look at kids today doing C++ with Arduino at school with similar ages.
So I really fail to understand the whole pandering "fresh college grad" concept.
