Seems making a new language is such a hard & massive task that designers are doomed to be at least a decade behind the times.
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IME, most interesting languages have a handful of cutting-edge or even novel features. The trouble is that implementing cutting-edge solutions for all facets of a language is nearly impossible due to the amount of work required to even be aware of them.
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That's true with any design discipline (architecture, graphic design, ux…). Often it's up to the designer to ask the right questions and through combination of experimentation and intuition figure out what the user really needs (time permitting).
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That's more a response to "Most users don't even know what to ask for" than the first part though.