It's often developers who are pushing for new features in a programming language. They think the addition of a feature will make it easier (or more convenient) to code the problem they face. Possibly reduce the lines of code.
That is the contradiction: does the addition of features makes the language more complex? Or do the features help simplify the code? Different answers for different languages?
It will be interesting to see the trajectory of new languages like Nim, Julia and Rust. These are medium-sized languages and Rust in particular is already considered complex by some programmers. Only time will show how much they grow in language features and complexity.
If the language makes writing the language (compiler, libraries, tooling, or whatever) easier, at the expense of making it harder to write programs in the language, then you're going to have a nice, easy-to-implement language that nobody will actually use to write programs. And what's the point of that?
That is the contradiction: does the addition of features makes the language more complex? Or do the features help simplify the code? Different answers for different languages?
It will be interesting to see the trajectory of new languages like Nim, Julia and Rust. These are medium-sized languages and Rust in particular is already considered complex by some programmers. Only time will show how much they grow in language features and complexity.