Don't worry about the parent's excessive negativity. Fast compilation time is a huge and underappreciated benefit. As for abstraction... I personally disagree

Don't worry about the parent's excessive negativity. Fast compilation time is a huge and underappreciated benefit. As for abstraction... I personally disagree with some of your conclusions as well, but I also recognize it's a fundamentally subjective topic. After all, how easy something is to understand depends on who is trying to understand it. Different people have different preferences and are familiar with different coding patterns.