[Rochus]

> These are all legitimate engineering tradeoffs

Agree, and we actually have both the standards and established methods to conduct representative tradeoff studies. But this knowledge is mostly ignored by CS and programming language designs. Even for Ada, there was little empirical evidence for specific design decision. A systematic survey discovered only 22 randomized controlled trials of textual programming language features conducted between the early 1950s through 2012, across six decades. This staggering scarcity explains why language designers rely heavily on intuition rather than evidence (see e.g. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~NatProg/programminglanguageusability...).