“The best things are still a reasonably small core of concepts, with the development team working hard to “factorize” any new feature into those concepts, and the flexible syntax that is instrumental for making the core small”

this is actually the definition of syntactic sugar, from a language design point of view. People often use it derogatorily to refer to bits of syntax that they simply don’t like, but as a term of art it refers to syntactic elements that are introduced in an effort to provide new ergonomics—new ways of working in a language—without altering the language’s fundamental primitives. - HN