[dwohnitmok]

> unfamiliar gets conflated with unintuitive and hard all the time

In a deep sense unfamiliar and unintuitive/hard can be viewed as the same thing (see e.g. the invariance theorem for Kolgomorov Complexity). Hence striving to be "familiar" is still a virtue that it makes sense for a programming language to aspire to (balanced of course against other concerns).

[teataster]

Familiarity is a characteristic of the agent.

Intuitiveness/duficult is of the object.

[dwohnitmok]

Objects are not intrinsically difficult or intuitive though. Different people will perceive the same thing to have different levels of difficulty or intuitiveness.

Or as Von Neumann said about mathematics (and I think the same is applicable to CS and programming): "You don't understand things. You just get used to them."