P.S.: The diversity in programming language design mirrors the diversity in how humans' minds work. Some people work better with dynamic than with static typing. Some people work better with Lisp, some with Haskell or ML, some better with Java and C#, some with APL and friends, etc. There is no one-size-fits-all, and one factor in the adoption of each language is how each programmer's cognition matches the respective kind of language, and also a little bit what they want to achieve practically with the language.
On the one hand it is important to have discussions on the benefits and drawbacks of different approaches in language design, and some people will change their minds based on that, but it's also an illusion that one single approach will ever suit everyone.
Human attributes are generally distributed on something like a bell curve. Programming languages with "extreme" characteristics in any direction will almost inevitably be stuck with niche popularity, because they will only be appealing to a small fraction of people. Whereas, even "extreme" people will generally be able to tolerate at least a couple of conventional languages.
At issue in this thread is the very definition of extreme vs conventional. The idea in this thread is that the languages now considered to be conventional could have been the niche syntax.
On the one hand it is important to have discussions on the benefits and drawbacks of different approaches in language design, and some people will change their minds based on that, but it's also an illusion that one single approach will ever suit everyone.