To preempt all of the inevitable responses: yes, I'm aware that this was started by the same guy who started LLVM and Swift. That doesn't automatically mean anything he comes up with will be great, especially when it's specifically trying to be "like" a language that doesn't really have much on common with either of those; there are plenty of instances of very smart people having an overabundance of confidence when jumping into something they assume they'll excel at and getting humbled. I'd also argue both Swift and LLVM have some common criticisms that very much are in line with the same concern I've expressed here (i.e. long term design suffering due to expanded or pivoted scope; even the name LLVM alludes to some of that history of having a somewhat different goal originally). His name is enough that I'll probably always click to take a first look at anything he comes up with, but I'm not going to ignore things that seem like issues because of that either. Smart people don't need to held to a lower standard because their work should be able to speak for itself.