Comment by willtim

There are certainly newer domain specific languages that fit your criteria such as Go. It can be verbose due to its lack of expressivity and its syntax. But simplicity to me is more about semantics. Should a successor to Javascript or PHP feature the same equality table or even be Turing complete?

There are general purpose languages that enable people to author complex programs because they have terse syntax and are highly expressive. In such cases the programs are complex but the languages are often semantically simple and consistent (e.g. Haskell).

I certainly do not agree in languages like C++, where for example they are attempting to combine the semantics of runtime memory management with the lambda calculus.