In a commentary on the essay, Scott Rosenberg says:
Plainly, Steele started out intending to show just how painful the words-of-one-syllable limit is — and, by extension, how desperately programmers need the ability to expand the vocabularies of languages that feel impoverished (“a thought that seems like a primitive in our minds turns out not to be a primitive in a programming language, and in each new program we must define it once more”). Yet what’s fascinating about “Growing a Language” is that the limits Steele imposed on his expression make the paper far more accessible, precise and clear than most computer-science writing.
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf
In a commentary on the essay, Scott Rosenberg says:
Plainly, Steele started out intending to show just how painful the words-of-one-syllable limit is — and, by extension, how desperately programmers need the ability to expand the vocabularies of languages that feel impoverished (“a thought that seems like a primitive in our minds turns out not to be a primitive in a programming language, and in each new program we must define it once more”). Yet what’s fascinating about “Growing a Language” is that the limits Steele imposed on his expression make the paper far more accessible, precise and clear than most computer-science writing.
http://www.wordyard.com/2007/06/12/steele-growing/