Do you mean to reinforce that the language is not
    beginner-friendly, or are you really asserting that
    makes the language poorly-designed? 

I was seeking to account to ramidarigaz why his CS classmates didn't understand pointers.

I think poor grammar is poor design - i.e. part of the type affects both variables (int), the other part doesn't (star).

The other issue is use of star to in one place to mean create reference, in others to mean dereference. That was the focus of my first post.

    from a design perspective that may simply be a
    tradeoff for some other advantage.

I've yet to see evidence of any. What sort of things were you thinking about?