Yes of course, I did not mean to imply there are only those two (that would be weird for the two to be "lists" and "functions" out of all things). What I mean

Yes of course, I did not mean to imply there are only those two (that would be weird for the two to be "lists" and "functions" out of all things). What I mean is the current mainstream languages are not the best of any category, like Haskell is up there for functional programming and lisp is up there for s-expressions. C++ is not the best for controlling details (see Rust, D, etc), in fact it's quite a broken language. I doubt Fortran is better at matrices than APL (in fact APL is arguably the best in the matrix category) and so on. That's the problem. These languages that are best in their categories are many many times better than the mainstream languages of today, which aren't the best in any category they represent.