Reminds me of the "no free lunch" theorem from ML. To paraphrase, there is no language that is better than every other language on all tasks.
Your statement is true (e.g. Javascript/C++/etc syntax is suboptimal and could be better). However it's a separate concept from what grandparent posters' grabcocque and visarga are talking about. If we engage with their point, it's not a "cop-out" but stating an important fundamental truth about the syntax of all programming languages. Many beginners do not know this truth as can be seen by the following questions in the wild:
- Why can't there be an “universal” programming language that serves all purposes? : https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4889...
- ELI5: Why isn't there a universal programming language? : https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2v84/el...
- Why are there so many programming languages? : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4334954/why-are-there-so...
- Why there are so many programming languages? Can't we create one language to do everything? : https://www.quora.com/Why-there-are-so-many-programming-lang...
The top voted answers in each case tries to explain it using analogies. (e.g. hammer is wrong tool for driving screws, etc). However, I'm not sure they actually provide the insight needed to make the questioner understand that creating the "One Universal Programming Language" is mathematically impossible. It's not possible to express multiple disparate concepts using finite characters with minimum string length for ease of typing and reading. All desirable concepts cannot simultaneously share the same minimal syntax for convenience. (This impossibility is also not solved by splitting concepts via language-vs-library as in "language reserved keywords" vs "library function calls".)
(As an educational exercise, we could ask the questioner to try to invent a "One Universal Programming Language". He would soon run into contradictions rooted in trying to express multiple concepts via finite symbols. Eventually of those concepts he desires will end up being encoded with noisier and inconvenient syntax.)
It could be argued that x86-64 is a universal programming language that currently serves all purposes across a very wide swath of all computation, modulo a number of interpreters, compilers, and VMs. Even that doesn't take care of literally all, however.
All Turing-complete languages are essentially equivalent, and there is some essential minimum complexity in any computation you'd like to describe. Any given language we use makes trade-offs, which cause some programs to be expressed simply in it, but the cost is that some other programs will become much more complex to express in it.
If this pushes complexity towards the expression of randomly generated programs, that's a good thing (except for the few guys that study randomly generated programs, that is).
Certainly there are tradeoffs to be made, but this does not mean that some languages are not simply better than others.
Possibly, though for sure those aren't programs you'd usually want to write.
The key phrase of my comment was "essential complexity". You can pile up extra complexity that's not helping anything, but assuming you got rid of it, all you can do to make things easier is to shift the remaining complexity around the problem space.
This is a very theoretical result that people often overinterpret bease it has a catchy name. But it has no relevance for real world data.
No Turing-Complete language is best for all problems.
(That's why CPUs get GPUs, for example.)
But that doesn't mean they are or are not "fit for purpose." That brings in a lot of subjective and human factors.