I disagree with several of these. But I guess that&#x27;s why 1) I am working on my own language, and 2) Walter Bright is a lot more successful at that than me. So yeah. He&#x27;s probably right, and I&#x27;m probably wrong. However: I&#x27;m doing this entirely for my own pleasure, and I don&#x27;t want success as he defines it (popularity means having to cater to the whims of others).<p>Disagreements:<p>I think minimizing keystrokes <i>is</i> important, and I think the notion that code is primarily read, not written, is idealistic but completely wrong. The purpose of programming languages is to be writable by humans and readable by machines. There is value in making them readable by humans and writable by machines, but only secondary value.<p>I think there is value in easy parsing, if nothing else because every single editor out there can highlight your language even if it isn&#x27;t popular. I think the focus on popularity as the measure of success is wrong.<p>Tried and true is overrated. There are plenty of examples of programming languages that break the tried and true rules and are successful either because of this or despite this. Either way, it doesn&#x27;t seem to matter as much as people seem to think, but staring too hard at the success of Java might make you think it does.<p>Anyway, feel free to disagree with me, go ahead and design your own language. I sincerely hope you are successful, regardless of what your definition of success is.