I am not sure exactly what qualifies as ""look at how smart I am" bullshit", but as someone making a toy language, exploring how a concept taken to its extreme in a language re-contextualizes other features is the main purpose of making it.

I have made a fair number of decisions against ergonomics in favor of less objectively important ideals because I don't plan to support people working on real problems. However, I do plan to make a self-hosting compiler though so I will have to deal with any issues I do make.

> that authors of such projects seem unable to resist

It definitely is very tempting to add things beyond the scope of a useful language (at a toy scale). I restricted myself from most such things by requiring strict C compatibility. You can't have a fancy type system and interop with C strongly.