I think it has less to do with typing difficulty and more to do with annoyance. Sometimes what people like is less about technical differences and more about pr

I think it has less to do with typing difficulty and more to do with annoyance. Sometimes what people like is less about technical differences and more about previously built mental models that reduce cognitive overhead. In other words: It let's them simply start playing and experimenting without having to relearn things they take for granted. If most people (let's say 99% for argument's sake) expect "string".length to refer to character count and only 1% need something like "string".utf8.count why not just accommodate them and make the language more accessible? This reminds me a bit of UX design. I've seen people time and again make the mistake over the years of designing their UX in a vacuum. What they produced wasn't bad or hard to use, it just broke expectations. All that said, sometimes breaking expectations is exactly what you should do because someone has to for things to change and move in the right direction. And sometimes when you do that you're taking one for the team, so to speak. Of course I don't know shit, but if I were looking at making a language popular I'd weigh doing what's "right" against my desire to increase the popularity carefully.