Alex Payne's thoughts... mentions a hypothesis that productive languages are conservative ones.
Judging from the progression of examples in the classic K&R "C" book, or one of Payne's example reactions (Godson) to Coffeescript, maintaining a similar division between the esoteric (expressive, to promote productivity) and the exoteric (familiar, to promote adoption) designs of a language may be important if the goal is to become "emerged". (squinting at Javascript itself as a "Self with curly-braces" would also fit in this model, but maybe I have a hammer here...)