Curiously I find myself disagreeing quite a bit with Larry.
> If a language is designed so that you can "learn as you go", then the expectation is that everyone is learning, and that's okay.
It's okay if we never reach understanding or agreement on what Faulkner intended by a particular sentence (we can still grasp most of the whole). For a programming language this is explicitly not okay! This goes for ambiguity as well.
> Multiple ways to say the same thing
> This one is more of an anthropological feature. People not only learn as they go, but come from different backgrounds, and will learn a different subset of the language first.
This increases cognative load with no particular benefit.
> If a language is designed so that you can "learn as you go", then the expectation is that everyone is learning, and that's okay.
It's okay if we never reach understanding or agreement on what Faulkner intended by a particular sentence (we can still grasp most of the whole). For a programming language this is explicitly not okay! This goes for ambiguity as well.
> Multiple ways to say the same thing
> This one is more of an anthropological feature. People not only learn as they go, but come from different backgrounds, and will learn a different subset of the language first.
This increases cognative load with no particular benefit.