Lambda the Ultimate

I disagree. I think PL design routinely encompasses at least points 1-3, if not points 1-5 of affirmative design. If you aren't doing so, then I might posit you're not designing a language but optimizing one. Most of the points of the first list aren't preclusive of the second list, except in the most narrow-minded literalist interpretations.

I think esoteric languages are exactly the application of critical design to PL design. Consider brainfuck. The original stated goal of the language design was to make a Turing-complete programming language with the smallest possible compiler. That is an unreal constraint - there is no measure of "small enough", there is no target usage. Just as small as possible. It certainly is disruptive of the status-quo in the sense that it doesn't really meet anybody's needs, and thus is unlike mainstream languages. And it clearly is viewed as a parody.

I would even go so far as to say that if you apply these principles of critical design to PL design, everyone in the PL community will consider your work to be esoteric languages, even if that is not your original goal.

IIRC, Alan Kay's group at VPRI are trying to build a complete system -- language, OS, apps -- on the rough order of 10 KLOC. This is a very strong "artificial" constraint, and a very humane one, as it suggests a good computer system should be the length of a good novel.

If BrainF*ck is an example of critical design its not a very successful one because it didn't disrupt much of anything.

Taking steampunk as a field of critical design, its disruptions have been potent. The asthetic it created helped to influence art communities like the Black Rock Foundation crowd (associated with Burning Man). Steampunk design conveyed and promoted a cynical mistrust of the reliability and virtue of the established economic order. It offered a positive vision of a technology less reliant on systems of global trade and massive infrastructure. The iconic image of a steampunk inventor might be a kind of mad scientist with welding goggles on his head working in a dark, greasy, workshop under the glow of hand-blown lightbulbs powered by homemade lead acid batteries kept charged by wind generators built from old car radiator fans and alternators and by a generator powered by biodiesel distilled on site from used fry oil collected from the dockworkers' tavern in the rough part of town.

Only, then that vision started to come true. As a side effect of these images taking off in political commentary art, at least around here, there is now a growing community of young (and older) new artists and organizers teaching and taking courses in glass blowing, welding, cutting and shaping metal, casting, improvisational mechanical engineering, leather work, and so on. The skills now (once again) starting to proliferate are being deployed to solve real world problems of how people cloth, shelter, and transport themselves. There are extreme examples like the local artist group that built themselves a colony out of shipping containers (and provoked a showdown over how building code regulations react to this new mode). There are less extreme examples like the significant number of contented bike riders I see who will probably never actually buy a bike rather than weld together an original design from scrap parts. Or the food resiliency activists building urban fish farm / hydroponic growing cycles out of low tech parts assembled in bespoke designs. Steampunk helped to make new ways to live and new kinds of career.

Brainf*ck never had quite that level of punch.

Some languages that might be better examples:

Unix itself and the "tiny languages" from Bell Labs were notoriously the product of something like critical design. A bit like Steampunk they originated as a critical questioning of conventional design efforts (mainly Multics) using all-but-discarded out of date computers. They rejected the heavy baggage of mainstream computing system design and looked for radical simplifications, specifically to empower very small numbers of programmers to be able to do what others were trying to do with very large teams. With C, the question posed was in some sense not "what is the ideal of a modern language" (you knew knew where to find PL/1 if you wanted it) but rather "what is a good language that the few of us can quickly implement on our own and that can run comfortably on these tiny machines?". In a way sort of like the way Steampunk gave rise to a virtuous cycle of skill development and a possible disruptive shift to real world ways of solving problems, C and the new unix created an energized group of programmers who then went out in search of problems they could solve cheaply and well, and that everyone else was neglecting. From that literal wandering around Bell Labs looking for researchers in other areas to help came the tiny languages movement with languages like sed, AWK, troff, grap, chem, m4, make, and quite a few others that didn't get as wide a circulation. So here was the unusual practice for its time (and to some extent still) of making language design one of the tools in the toolbox for solving real world problems (as with chem being designed to aid the typesetting of diagrams of molecules).

The individualist, mad-scientist language-happy approach the Lab demonstrated went on to inspire Perl. After a little time, the unix approach was mainstream and increasingly applied in affirmative design contexts.

The new mainstream was again disrupted in the 1990s with a new generation of languages, perhaps the most famous and successful being Python. Again, it was an individual mad-scientist aesthetic at first, and a reaction against the unwieldy heft of what the more traditional unix tools had become. It (and a few others) proliferated wildly over the net and again, changed economies and ways of life.

Other older examples: Smalltalk and Scheme.

Scheme did not start with a well defined problem to solve, as nearly as I can tell. It started as an attempt to critically examine the essence of lisp in the context of then new programming language theory and compiler and interpreter writing practice. It may not have had the same kind of global adoption as the unix tools but it did bring about significant shifts in computer science pedagogy as well as intellectual and economic shifts (e.g. the PLT team).

Smalltalk has not fared terribly well in terms of direct adoption either but it again started as a small team asking critical questions and starting with a blank sheet of paper to see what they could build rather than starting with a few well known questions to answer.

Most programming language design evolves from some existing language; perhaps not directly but at least conceptually. Java was very much derivative of what preceded it. Few languages are actually revolutionary and those that are often only plant the seeds of revolution so subsequent language design is once again seen as evolution rather than revolution.

As a consequence I think the majority of language design is going to be affirmative. But, critical design would still play an important role. Any time you need to explore the design space, critical design seems unavoidable to me. So it seems to me that the distinction is perhaps not as useful in understanding programming language design since I doubt you can find examples where a language took a pure design approach (either affirmative or critical). So I find the distinction interesting but perhaps not real useful (to me).