That's never really true, because using a language means using other people's libraries, and using libraries means debugging and extending them, so you eventually end up needing to work with anything the language can serve up.

This is my beef with JavaScriot these days... They introduced a slew of new, in my opinion insane, control structures, and while I can avoid them in my code, they are still slowly polluting my dependencies, and adding obscure runtime requirements for my projects.