I actually feel this way about C++ to some extent. I love that C++ has zero overhead abstractions. I hate that to use them requires programming in the most obtu

I actually feel this way about C++ to some extent. I love that C++ has zero overhead abstractions. I hate that to use them requires programming in the most obtuse and indirect meta language. If you ever read, I think it was Modern C++? Where they point out the huge "trick" in C++ was someone figuring out you could make a compile time branch by declaring arrays of size 0 or some such nonsense. They then wrapped that feature in a template so you could then try to use it. At some point they formalized it so it's no longer based on arrays of size 0 but still, read any boost library and look at how unreadable it is. It might be nice to use, but it shouldn't be so hard to write! But, I think the fact that it is hard to write brings joy indirectly to many programmers. They get a dopamine hit for "solving the puzzle of finally getting their cryptic incantation to work". Maybe they write a bitset class. It takes 500-1000 lines of code. Or maybe they make a lighter weight fixed size array and again it's 1000+ lines of template code. They forget that the goal of coding is shipping, not having fun solving the incantation puzzle. It doesn't seem like it take 1000+ lines to do these things.