One reason I’m keen on programming languages as a tool for advancing software development is because reversion to the mean is real: working in JavaScript, I see daily how language affordances can make it easy for developers to do things which are terrible for maintenance… and make it hard for developers to do things which are good for maintenance, for just one example.
I could, and perhaps in a future post will, expand on a list of other things language affordances affect! The key, though, is the recognition that language affordances matter enormously, even if “you can write FORTRAN in any language.”