Language designers often aim to make their languages simpler, more elegant, or smaller. If we are doing practical language design (as opposed to design for fun or research), these are not goals, only proxies. Programming languages should be easy to use and easy to learn.

'Easy to use' means (usually) easy to read, write, and operate on using tools. Easy to learn means not just learning the language's features, but learning the idioms/patterns/techniques of the language too.

Simpler, more elegant, and smaller are only good proxies for easy to use and learn because our natural tendency is to make languages too big and too complex ("I'll just add this feature and that feature and, oh, the feature is pretty cool too").

Language design is about balance and trade-offs. No one wants to write software in the lambda calculus and not many people want to do it in Cobol. We need to design languages which balance their complexity and size, not striving to be the smallest or simplest, but to be the easiest and most pleasant to use.