That seems a little unfair. I have better things to do with my programming time than reinvent the wheel every time I need to manipulate common data structures,

That seems a little unfair. I have better things to do with my programming time than reinvent the wheel every time I need to manipulate common data structures, or make an HTTP request, or query a database, or parse a CSV file, or do some mathematics efficiently, or draw a picture showing the results of that mathematics. I’m some way past 25 these days, but if there is one lesson I’ve learned about programming languages over the years, it is that a good supporting ecosystem usually is worth more than even quite substantial improvements in the language itself. It’s not that language improvements aren’t welcome — I think some programming languages are much better than others. However, you’re always going to be limited in how productive you can be with a language that lacks comprehensive libraries or good tools or enough people using it to discuss interesting issues or hire a full team of staff, no matter how brilliant the design of the language itself might be. I don’t know what the worst mainstream programming languages are today, but in purely technical terms surely C, Java and JavaScript all make the shortlist. Compared to many other contemporary languages, these three all lack features, often take a lot of code to get quite simple things done, and are full of easy ways to make mistakes. And yet, in terms of how much useful software has been written in them, they are among the most successful languages we’ve ever had. Why? At least in part, I think it’s because they have three of the most well-developed ecosystems around them.