I think your h4ck3r-versus-n00b dichotomy may need a little adjustment.
It’s true that some hackers prefer mathematics-y languages like, say, Haskell or Scheme, with elegantly minimal syntax and a modest selection of powerful features that add up to something tremendous.
But _plenty_ of highly skilled and experienced software-makers program in, for instance, C++, which really doesn’t score too highly on the elegance-and-abstraction front. Plenty more like to program in C, which does better on elegance and worse on abstraction and is certainly a long way from mathematical elegance. Plenty more like to program in Python, which was originally designed to be (inter alia) a noob-friendly language, and is in fact a pretty good choice for a first language to teach to a learner. And, on the other side of things, Scheme—which seems like it has a bunch of the characteristics you’re saying are typical of “expert-focused” languages—has always had a great deal of educational use, by (among others) the very people who were and are designing it.
If you’re designing a programming language, you certainly need to figure out whether to focus on newcomers or experts, but I don’t think that choice alone nails down very much about the language, and I don’t think it aligns with elegance-versus-let’s-politely-call-it-richness.
I think your h4ck3r-versus-n00b dichotomy may need a little adjustment.
It’s true that some hackers prefer mathematics-y languages like, say, Haskell or Scheme, with elegantly minimal syntax and a modest selection of powerful features that add up to something tremendous.
But _plenty_ of highly skilled and experienced software-makers program in, for instance, C++, which really doesn’t score too highly on the elegance-and-abstraction front. Plenty more like to program in C, which does better on elegance and worse on abstraction and is certainly a long way from mathematical elegance. Plenty more like to program in Python, which was originally designed to be (inter alia) a noob-friendly language, and is in fact a pretty good choice for a first language to teach to a learner. And, on the other side of things, Scheme—which seems like it has a bunch of the characteristics you’re saying are typical of “expert-focused” languages—has always had a great deal of educational use, by (among others) the very people who were and are designing it.
If you’re designing a programming language, you certainly need to figure out whether to focus on newcomers or experts, but I don’t think that choice alone nails down very much about the language, and I don’t think it aligns with elegance-versus-let’s-politely-call-it-richness.