You’re making a strawman argument from a pretty high proverbial horse there ;)

First off: I never said all languages are made equal. Literally the opposite: I said all languages make trade offs.

The fact that languages make trade offs means they’re not equal but rather they’re targeting different requirements.

You referenced Assembly but actually some problems are easier to solve in assembly. In those instances you’ll sprinkle your ASM inside your higher level language like C, Rust, Go, whatever rather than trying to hit everything with the same hammer.

In fact inlining foreign code is a common design pattern in most general purpose languages, eg Python supports CFFI (calling C FFI) for when you reach the limits of what can be done effectively in native Python.

As for Brainfuck, the point of that language is to create an esoteric Turing complete language with the fewest tokens. Readability was very deliberately a tradeoff. So BF is another example of my point.

More generally speaking: a lot of this stuff does just boil down to personal productivity and preferences. Because different people’s brains are wired differently and different people need to solve different types of problems.

You accidentally proved this point when you said “I’m not a parentheses guy” before commenting on Racket.

This is the real crux of language debates. Where you say “PHP sucks” what you actually mean is “I prefer other languages because I solve different problems that aren’t as well suited to PHP”

But being rational like this is hard because bro-programmers love to mock people who aren’t part of their tribe. (This dumb tribalism is probably my biggest pet peeve in tech. People really need to learn to grow the fuck up).

Great points all, admittedly!

I think I'm scarred by having churned too many man-hours supporting spagetti ASP code and Ruby "magic" behavior.