The principle of orthogonal design is something I learned in CS, but hardly anyone mentions any more. The idea boils down to building software parts in a consistent way such that can be combined and re-used to form new things. The way you can accomplish this is by having very few rules. The more "syntaxy" a language is, the less orthogonal it is.
For more reading and discussion on this topic: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1035...