This comment reminded me of a lesson in The Elements of Programming Style: Use good language features, eschew the bad ones (paraphrased). After reading this,

This comment reminded me of a lesson in The Elements of Programming Style: Use good language features, eschew the bad ones (paraphrased). After reading this, some opinions across a few languages made more sense. For example, Crockford advocates subsetting, hence JS The Good Parts. There are also more times than I can count where choosing a subset of C++ from its stupendously large array of features. When you think about it, it's possible to write esoteric, hard to read code in many languages, even ones designed to improve programmer productivity. If a language offers you capabilities that can blow readability out of the window, you'll see it happen. The more capabilities for such and the larger the number of programmers using the language, I'm sure you'll see a larger number of cases where code is indecipherable. From experience, to finish, I've seen a lot of very straight-forward C++ code that shines with readability compared with some Python code I've come across.