The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.
My arthritic pinkies are already starting to ache just thinking about ||||=.
Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.
Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.
It should be illegal to yell 'Y2K' in a crowded economy.
The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other.