[barrkel]

Ergonomics changes your design decisions. When some idiom of code or data or both is awkward to express, you'll lean naturally to something else, which may have drawbacks not related to ergonomics, like coupling or over-abstraction or duplication, etc.

Ergonomics goes into the mix of tradeoffs for design. Something like LINQ's expression trees, for example; not easy to do in Java not because ASTs can't be constructed, but because their construction isn't as ergonomic.

[sanderjd]

I think in Java this is most notable in the boilerplate it takes to create value types (and related: typedefs). This often leaks from the realm of bad ergonomics into the realm of bad design; primitive proliferation is a common problem that I believe would be less pronounced were there a more convenient way to define a value type.