Minimalism is usually in the eye of the beholder.

There are only a few languages designed with minimalism explicitly in mind (Go is a good example), but even there (a language within which application developers readily accept doing the job normally assigned to the language and compiler) the demand for some minimal set of useful abstractions is forcing the language to grow over time.

Let's be honest: Most complaints about bloat are actually complaints about stupid design decisions.

But at the same time, it's admittedly difficult to learn something when it has a lot of one-off corner cases.