This argument is common, but I think it's bogus. There's plenty of astonishing Java out there. More rigid languages don't lead to less astonishment under compl

This argument is common, but I think it's bogus. There's plenty of astonishing Java out there. More rigid languages don't lead to less astonishment under complexity. A given line of code may contain less astonishment, because there are fewer possibilities for what it might be doing, but what matters is global understanding, not local. The meaning of a program is not the sum of the meaning of its parts. Otherwise we'd all be writing in assembler; it's easy to say what this is doing, locally: mov eax, [ebp + 8] The key is writing well-behaved and consistent code, which you can do in most languages. But the set of problems for which a well-behaved and consistent program is readily writeable is not the same for all languages.