I agree. Languages like Elm and Go seem much more sane and we'd have to include other very good examples of this like Julia and AWK. They are designed to serve

I agree. Languages like Elm and Go seem much more sane and we'd have to include other very good examples of this like Julia and AWK. They are designed to serve a specific purpose and (try to) make the right trade-offs to achieve that. Because that is what every language has to do. There is always something about a language that is crappy/boring/verbose/difficult/complected. And even with highly extensible languages (Lisp) you are at least forced to be disciplined, which also 'sucks' in a way. Having the right trade-offs/constraints around a purpose/domain opens up many opportunities for optimization of performance, readability, accessibility and so on.