I regularly do all of those things . . . in Perl, with either core features of the language, or ubiquitous, well-supported libraries, in readable, concise code

I regularly do all of those things . . . in Perl, with either core features of the language, or ubiquitous, well-supported libraries, in readable, concise code that doesn't "fight" with the language/runtime. Something like Java definitely makes some of those things very hard née impossible, but not all high level languages are the same in those regards. (And yeah, I just called Perl "readable". Bite me.)