Language design based on what people want to achieve: that's basically what php, perl, python, visual basic... many others are/were.

It works pretty well!

Then... what people want to achieve changes, maybe they want to write a web app instead of desktop, and then you're screwed. Perl was excellent when everything was text... but when things started being XML or JSON or whatever, less so.

It's a fair point though, languages built around practicality have their place.