Isn't that, in many ways, the opposite of what people want out of a programming languages? It seems to me that expressiveness, and robustness (in the sense that you define robustness) are inversely related.

Whenever a language comparison pops up, there's always a large contingent of people who argue for the superiority of a language because ideas can be expressed more concisely in 'their' language, but that necessarily means that some small change will have a relatively large effect.

There's also robustness in the sense that, e.g., BitC was trying to be robust, and that's something that I think is promising.