Depends on how you define “success”. I would argue that Ruby is a very successful language. Or even Clojure (to take a less popular example): As long as it’s continuously maintained, has a loyal community, and a set of useful libraries, I don’t see what’s wrong
I would argue that the planned design isn’t a property of the system, at least not yet, as it’s not actually put into action :) But tweet-sized sound bites are always an oversimplification, of course