different languages are different, and they have every right to be different, and I have every right to point out in whichever ways they differ. Personal tastes differ, too, and as far as I'm concerned I think that using 'shorthand Boolean coalescence' (I just made up that term) is a false convenience; when I write a condition that relies on a list being empty, ideally that should look like `if is_empty a then ...`
according to my taste—explicit is better than implicit, and this is still concise.
Be that as it may but shrugging and sighing, like, "ah well, different languages will be different" and using that as an argument against a discussion of the merits and demerits of certain aspects of certain languages is not constructive, is it?