I agree with the analysis of the problem, but disagree with the solution: while it's true that increased expressiveness in a system tends to increase the cognit

I agree with the analysis of the problem, but disagree with the solution: while it's true that increased expressiveness in a system tends to increase the cognitive burden of understanding it, what you want is to maximize expressiveness at the smallest cognitive cost possible, not to limit expressiveness. I mean, sure, sometimes it's a good trade-off to limit expressiveness, but most often than not we could make a lot of progress by making certain features simpler, more accessible, or following a model that's easier to understand for humans (matching better human intuition, or more accessible, so it's easy to get easy things done, and you are not hit by complexity unless you really need it). I argue that we can still make a lot of progress and create better models for many things related to programming languages, including (but not limited to): unicode, interprocess communication (and in general compatibility of data across programs and languages), access to graphics and audio APIs, pass by value vs pass by reference, mutability vs immutability, transparency of memory models, cross-compatibility, database accessibility, etc.