I assume that a sufficiently skilled will be able to do anything not explicitly forbidden by the hardware.

The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.

It is my firm belief that all successful languages are grown and not merely designed from first principles

The first law of computer science: Every problem is solved by yet another indirection.

Any verbose and tedious solution is error-prone because programmers get bored.

Some software is actually pretty good, by any standard. Think of the Mars Rovers, Google, and the Human Genome Project. Now, that's quality software!

People who passionately want to believe that the world is basically simple react to this with a fury that goes beyond what I consider appropriate for discussing a programming language.