It would be hard to think of something I'd done that didn't use this trick. There are lots of examples in Arc. I chose quite different problems to solve than language designers usually do. It's not that common to design a language by writing applications in it, and making the language have whatever features are necessary to make those applications short.

In this case the difference isn't so much that I chose a different problem to solve as that I chose any problem at all. I get the impression most language design is driven not so much by explicit goals as by a collection of half-formulated principles.