Of course, it's a matter of tradeoffs. It's particularly interesting to observe how Rust is moving along: since I started watching it, it has undergone a huge quantity of non-trivial changes. Which would tend to show that "worse is better" doesn't work for programming languages. Indeed, languages which have grown organically, like PHP, are not well-regarded. Maybe it's a question of surface: the smaller unpolished surface you expose to the outside, the faster you can ship something which will not turn into PHP later. If your CLI is not well thought-out, it's not a big problem, but you won't be able to make drastic, incompatible changes in syntax and semantics for a programming language with millions of existing lines (ask the Python 3 people :) ).