Curiously, both Google and Apple follow the "MIT/Stanford" school of design (though Google has lately been trending toward the "New Jersey" school). And it's generally been working out for them. Microsoft was always the New Jersey school, and it isn't exactly working for them now, although it did for many years.
These are also product philosophies, relating to how much you are willing to make life difficult for yourself to keep the interface to your product simple.
One thing my VP (at Google) said has stuck with me: "It's okay if the code is gross as long as it's hidden behind an API. If the problem's complex, that complexity should be captured in the code rather than forcing the user to deal with it."
It does seem to have some interesting features for a systems level language--for example, expressions over statements and references over pointers.