Because for a good long time, programming languages were accidentally complex, and verbosity and hoop-jumping were a legitimately large amount of the development time. 1990s-era C++ GUI programming makes my eyes bleed.<p>I don&#x27;t think this is particularly true anymore, but ideas take 15-20 years to finally die out in the programming world, and we&#x27;re only 5-10 years into that cycle. Languages still have varying degrees of accidental complexity but compared to where we used to be, you almost always have the choice of some nearly-optimal language. (Many may still not avail themselves of those choices but that&#x27;s their own problem.)