Principles of Language Design
These are great information engineering principles in general, and they happen to be written specifically for language design.
Abstraction: Avoid requiring something to be stated more than once; factor out the recurring pattern.
Automation: Automate mechanical, tedious, or error-prone actives.
Defense in Depth: Have a series of defenses so that if an error isn't caught by one, it will probably be caught by another.
Information Hiding: The language should permit modules designed so that (1) the user has all of the information needed to use the module correctly, and nothing more; (2) the implementor has all of the information needed to implement the module correctly, and nothing more
Labeling: Avoid arbitrary sequences more than a few items long; do not require the user to know the absolute position of an item in a list. Instead, associate a meaningful label with each item and allow the items to occur in any order.
Localized Cost: Users should only pay for what they use; avoid distributed costs.
Manifest Interface: All interfaces should be apparent (manifest) in the syntax.
Orthogonality: Independent functions should be controlled by independent mechanisms.
Portability: Avoid features or facilities that are dependent on a particular machine or a small class of machines.
Preservation of Information: The language should allow the representation of information that the user might know and the the compiler might need.
Regularity: Regular rules, without exceptions, are easier to learn, use, describe, and implement.
Security: No program that violates the definition of the language, or its own intended structure, should escape detection.
Simplicity: A language should be as simple as possible. There should be a minimum number of concepts with simple rules for their combination.
Structure: The static structure of the program should correspond in a simple way with the dynamic structure of the corresponding computations.
Syntactic Consistency: Similar things should look similar, different things different.
Zero-One-Infinity: The only reasonable numbers are zero, one, and infinity.
Source: Principles of Programming Languages, B. J. MacLennan, CBS College Publishing, 1983, pp 526-527.