What characteristics make programmers conceive a language as beautiful?

Question

It seems to me that some languages are generally being conceived as more beautiful than others. This seems to apply to all programming paradigms. Are there any abstract/paradigm-spanning characteristics which makes programmers consider a language as beautiful?

Edit: If you think that there is no consensus then please don't hesitate to state your own views

Answer 1

What I consider beautiful is conceptual minimalism or more precisely an orthogonal set of few general language primitives ...

as opposed to many less powerful features needed to describe almost the same thing, while permanently having to consider special cases.

Haskell for example is basically just some syntax around three primitives with an incredibly small type system (just values, generics, constructors, typeclasses) that covers everything in such a powerful way that maybe no other common language can achieve. The notion of a again value covers everything - data, functions, objects (as a collection of values), ...

Classic VB on the other side has even more than five ways of looping built-in. There is made a difference between values and functions, plain data and objects, ... And the whole almost without any possibility of writing generic code.

Answer 2

There aren't any universal rules for beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - everyone has their own idea of beauty.

Personally I like languages that allow you to write code that is concise but not cryptic. It expresses what I am thinking with no extra cruft or magic arcane syntax.