This misses a few things (aside from english grammar). For one, while there are fields where user demand is the most important design basis, language design is

This misses a few things (aside from english grammar). For one, while there are fields where user demand is the most important design basis, language design is not one of them. I believe that the design of a language should put ab initio thoughts at the beginning. That box "Ergonomic study and user survey" is actually "Old user habits". Nowadays, everyone seems to think that a useful language has to look like C. I think that this habit is a big impediment to innovation in this field. This brings me to the next point of bother: semicola are not simply something to be dropped from otherwise C-like syntax. It is actually not dropped, but replaced by syntactic whitespace. That means that the programmer has the additional burden of determining whether he may put a newline at some point in code without it being interpreted as a statement terminator. I believe that syntactic whitespace---i.e. that the amount and type of whitespace are significant for the interpretation of the program---is a fundamentally flawed idea. Of course, C syntax is a complete mess, but dropping semicola is not a solution at all because the real problem sits much deeper.