Whilst you're not wrong about what you value about a programming "language", I'd say there is an important distinction to be drawn between two things people ten

Whilst you're not wrong about what you value about a programming "language", I'd say there is an important distinction to be drawn between two things people tend to conflate: the language and the runtime. Perhaps a counterexample is in order to explain it: Java the language and Java the runtime (VM, stl) are two different things entirely. Kotlin, for example makes a lot of different choices in language design (e.g. semicolons) while reusing the same runtime (GC, threads, etc.) Of course, you can often not tease these two concerns apart easily and neatly, but there is merit in giving thought to the ergonomics of the pure language side of things. At the end of the day, a programming language doesn't need an implementation to be useful (e.g. as a teaching tool) as it's an abstract, formal concept.