> the core challenge of programming is to write code that inexperienced people can understand quickly

This is a pipe dream. For anything significantly non-trivial, programming is inherently complex. Designing the language so that code is forced to be "simple" at the lowest scale just pushes that complexity up to larger scale code structures.

Trying to make programs easier to understand by limiting the expressivity of the language is like trying to make quantum physics easier by reformulating it without using complex numbers. Whilst it may well make each individual step of a calculation easier to understand, it doesn't make the whole any easier to comprehend.