> Your simplicity becomes my complexity (fussy compatibility, batching creates latency, etc)

Forth is simple. (It is not that hard to write a simple Forth system that implements the language in a workable fashion.)

Python is simple. (It is a good choice for a first programming language, and plenty of people use it to rough out ideas because it allows them to ignore some kinds of resource management details and comes with a large standard library.)

Equivocating on 'simple' is a neat trick if you can pull it off.