It can be argued that some languages or technologies are superior to others in expressive power [0]. Some languages or technologies are easier to learn, but the

It can be argued that some languages or technologies are superior to others in expressive power [0]. Some languages or technologies are easier to learn, but the solutions they produce are more complex, less simple, and/or less elegant; thus, one should strive to use the most expressive or "powerful" technologies available. Granted, the shadow aspect of this line of thinking is the constant treadmill of fashionable JS frameworks and the tribalism you allude to. That being said, Moxie was recently featured on HN frontpage [1] regarding black boxes of abstraction and a lack of understanding of what goes on underneath. Much of development these days (think npm left-pad) is unnecessary abstraction and obscurantism of how the machine actually operates. Few people understand the underlying concepts and technologies, and many are trained only to operate trendy frameworks, languages, and technologies. Once the abstractions leak, and they always will [2], they are often lost as they don't understand how to step down a layer of abstraction to something more primitive. To this extent the point can be made that it may sometimes be worthwhile to not overcomplicate your solution stack with too many layers of indirection [3]. Not only does this simplify debugging, but you can more clearly see how your system actually operates and enrich your understanding of the software. To this extent it can be argued that one ought to pursue simpler, more "standard" (ES6, even jQuery) solution stacks in the JS space instead of the combinatorial explosion of dependencies and multilayer cake of abstractions that seems to be par for the course today. It should be noted that level of abstraction and expressive power, while not quite orthogonal, are not quite collinear either [0]. [0] https://paulgraham.com/avg.html https://paulgraham.com/avg.html [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41208627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41208627 [2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_software_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_softwar...