Sure, but abstractions have a cost. 5 lines of code written with just the core language and standard library are often much easier to read and digest than a ne

Sure, but abstractions have a cost. 5 lines of code written with just the core language and standard library are often much easier to read and digest than a new abstraction or call to some library. And it’s just an unfortunate fact of life that many of the common programming languages are not terribly ergonomic; it’s not uncommon for even basic operations to require a few lines of boilerplate. That isn’t always bad as languages are balancing many different goals (expressiveness, performance, simplicity and so on).