> feel simple to write
that's what i'm talking about. people don't want to know about first class functions, closures, immutability, monads, object orientation, polymorphism, inheritance, generics, contravariance, covariance, threading, concurrency, race conditions, memory safety or package managers. they just want to whip up some shit and have it work.
and you're right they don't care about long-term maintainability at all. that leads to all the conceptual overhead though. they'd rather have a horribly bolted together language than be forced to worry about the concepts that lead to long-term maintainability.
Something like Dhall is much better for long-term maintainability. But people don't want a language that makes them write consistent, maintainable code. They'd rather have a language where you can leave the quotes off your strings and it will work most of the time except when it doesn't.