I'm with you about all code is difficult to beginners. About language designers, they should decide who they want to address with their language and how popular

I'm with you about all code is difficult to beginners. About language designers, they should decide who they want to address with their language and how popular they want it to be. If they want to become mainstream and they don't have a way to force people to use it (example: Apple with Objective C and Swift) then they should make a language with a syntax similar to something already mainstream. Example: Elixir got reasonably popular and in its early days it was common to think about it as a functional Ruby. It is not. Anybody using it would find it very different from Ruby by the end of the first day. However there is at least a correspondence between many Module.function / Class.module names in the standard library and the same do / end general structure of code blocks. My advice to any language designer aiming to mainstream status is to copy some curly braces language (Java, JS, C++) or Python. Then do any weird thing to them, but don't scare away millions of developers with your hello world.