on how trying to make programming languages easier in some ways is doomed to fail
This is prob right, but the 'in some ways' part does a lot of work here. Think the issue is that some complexity can be removed without problem, and some absolutely cannot. And the problem of figuring out which is which is hard. (Which if you squint, seems to be similar to the chemistry stuff you describe here). With software it (as far as I can tell) is also quickly that bigger projects need bigger teams, and that adds a lot of communication problems, and as a non-stacking process you can't just add more programmers to make stuff go faster (compared to for example building a building, which can be sped up a lot more with just more workers) as these communication problems remain. From what I heard is that this, and the problem of maintaining software on a large scale is what Java was trying to fix. Which is why all programmers love Java. It is a language for enterprise scale projects. (On that note, which is also why a lot of reason people hate Java for the wrong reasons, a lot of the hated stuff makes sense if you recall it is made for enterprise scale projects/teams etc. It is an attempt to make those projects easier (lets leave it in the middle if that attempt worked or not (Do think it is amusing that Minecraft of all things was coded in Java by a single person (initially))).
Interesting our community seems to attract a few outspoken chemistry people. Not something I know much about, know somebody who does something with crystal chemistry machines, and when he technically talks about it I'm happy I understand about 30% :).
Ah so that is good news, worried it might be offline due to legal troubles, but it is technical troubles. Thanks for all your (and everybody else involved) service an all that.