> But that is a composition of both language syntax/features and libraries I agree with that, but I also think of a language as being syntax, libraries, and id

> But that is a composition of both language syntax/features and libraries I agree with that, but I also think of a language as being syntax, libraries, and idioms together. Libraries give words, and the base language gives the ability to coin new ones. This is something Stephen Wolfram was advertising with his rebranding of Mathematica as the Wolfram Language, since while a pattern matching execution engine is useful symbolic calculations, it is nothing compared to the body of algorithms and data already curated and ready for use. > I could use cURL Arguably, the cURL is itself a specialized language for interacting with different file protocols, designed so that sort of task is easy. It's an embedded DSL in C. > I think your tradeoff is actually a false dichotomy. I didn't mean for it to be a dichotomy, just that if you have too much of one quality then you tend to have less of the other since doing both well is hard. I was thinking about how in my experience programs in languages with lots of formalities tend to ossify and become hard to change. > but it is really how you design your code that allows malleability for changes. That is true, and that's why I'd rather have the language make the local concerns easy and malleable so I can spend more time thinking about the global design. > compilers aren't meant to find defects, they are there to build your code That is one way to view a compiler, though I appreciate how hard it is to get NullPointerException-like-defects in Haskell. I also didn't actually mean "check" for defects, I meant making it so that defects can't happen due to some language feature which precludes them. Typo-like defects, not necessarily whether the program provably matches the spec. (And spec checking tends to make the language less malleable to spec changes...) I'm sure you'd agree that it is nice we don't have to allocate addresses by hand for variables anymore, and with it dealing with the class of errors of miscoding the address of a variable, or the difficulty of updating a program when the variable positions change. (I'm much too young to have been there for this early history, but I have compiled small programs by hand for hobby projects or educational value.) Most compiled languages don't let you use a variable which has not been declared (and at least C emits a warning) --- this can be thought of as a language feature which addresses variable address defects.