In general, you shouldn’t judge a language by the complexity of its standard library implementation unless you are planning to implement a comparable library.

In general, you shouldn’t judge a language by the complexity of its standard library implementation unless you are planning to implement a comparable library. Application code often only needs a subset of the language and can be much more readable. The standard library needs to use every trick available to make itself expressive, reusable, backwards-compatible, and easy-to-use for callers. But for your application code you certainly want to make different tradeoffs.