[OneWingedShark]

> Who is wrong, the programmer trying to speak the language or the language itself?

This is more complicated a question than you think. If the language is such that you always have to look up some particular feature, then it's likely the language is wrong in that the designer chose that syntax poorly. OTOH, if the programmer just "threw something together" that happened to be incorrect, then obviously the programmer.

This latter example is actually where having good error-messages can come in: pointing out what is wrong, and perhaps some relevant location in the language-definition. — Compare and contrast Ada and C++ error-messages (for "typical implementations") here as an example.