The complexity is inherent to the problem domain. Rust has many string types because the word "string" has been overloaded to mean any of dozens of different in

The complexity is inherent to the problem domain. Rust has many string types because the word "string" has been overloaded to mean any of dozens of different internal representations, each of which has different performance or correctness tradeoffs. The programmer's ability to optimize would be sharply limited if they couldn't choose between String, Box<str>, CString, OsString, and so on. That's why, in my opinion, any attempt to create a "simple" systems language is doomed to failure. You can't have the simplicity of Python and also be able to manually assign values to specific registers. It's better to carve out niches in the design space: low-level (C / C++ / Rust), general-purpose (Java / C# / Go), scripting (Python / Ruby / Lua).