> failed to make that clear [...] the burden of additional information to retain is about the semantics applicable to the language itself, not about the toolin

> failed to make that clear [...] the burden of additional information to retain is about the semantics applicable to the language itself, not about the tooling that we have build around it for development. [...] knowledge burden that must be retained at all times to be able to make sense of what you are reading Not lack of clarity I think - it seems there's a real disagreement there. I agree about the burden, and the role of complex semantics in increasing it. But I think of bearing the burden as more multifaceted than being solely about the language. I think of it as a collaboration between language, and tooling, and tasteful coding. For maintenance, the last is unavailable. But there's still tooling. If the language design makes something unclear and burdensome, it seems to me sufficient that language tooling clarifies it and lifts the burden. That our tooling is often as poor as our languages, perhaps makes this distinction less interesting. But a shared attribution seems worth keeping in mind - an extra point of leverage. Especially since folks so often choose seriously suboptimal tooling, and tasteless engineering, and then attribute their difficulties to the language. There's much truth to that attribution, but also much left out. Though as you pointed out, cognitive styles could play a role. I was at a mathy talk with a math person, and we completely disagreed on the adequacy of the talk. My best trick is "surfing" incompletely-described systems. His best trick is precisely understanding systems. Faced with pairs of code and tooling, I could see us repeatedly having divergent happiness. Except where some future nonwretched language finally permits nice code.