The principle of least surprise is all very well, but "needless surprise of newbies" is a dangerous criterion to adopt for programming language design and following it consistently would lead to a mess like Visual Basic, which grew by accretion until Microsoft realized it was no longer tenable and broke backward compatibility.
Well, *needless* surprise of newbies is never a good thing. If it were, it wouldn't be needless, now would it? :-) Surprising newbies just to surprise newbies is just cruel, but there is room in this world for "it may suprise you now, but you'll thank us later" and situations where there is a "newbie way" and an "other way", and the "other" way is chosen because it's the easiest thing for the most people in the long run.
But I agree, having "the easiest thing for newbies" as your sole criterion for language design is a road to madness, for no other reason than that newbies don't stay newbies forever.
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