I think you have a point, but the situation you describe is largely because things are in flux - that is certainly the case for web pages. When consensus is re

I think you have a point, but the situation you describe is largely because things are in flux - that is certainly the case for web pages. When consensus is reached, things settle down - so most new languages give you associative arrays out of the box. On the other hand, there was a time when exceptions seemed to be the consensus on runtime error handling, but there has been some rethinking on that... Then there is APL, which seems to exemplify what you are asking for. It is very well-regarded by those who get it, but it seems to have been just too difficult (or alien) for most of the engineers whose purpose it addresses. Haskell may not be the best example to make a case from, as it is still, to a large extent, an experimental language. Spreadsheets are also something of an outlier, as they are a system of data manipulation already developed before it was practical to computerize them.