I don't think I've ever seen a large project that wasn't pushing the limits of its language in one way or another—just with popular languages, the language is treated as a given and people jump right to finding workarounds or tweaking their own designs rather than even considering contributing to GCC or Python or whatever they're using. (Not quite general-purpose languages, but don't get me started on the pain I've had with Hadoop and Hive... but trying to change those was, somehow, never on anybody's mind.)