My take was always language quality is not about expressive power, because it's fairly difficult to come up with a non Turing complete system anyways, it is about what is easy to understand and modify.
VB6 code was easy to understand on one level, but its lack of expressiveness lead to a lot more code. On the other hand when I look at Ruby code there is too much syntactic sugar for a non-ruby programmers to understand it without looking some thing sup.
