I agree that programming languages are an interesting to view over that axis.
I've done a fair amount with Elm, which is undoubtedly hugely opinionated, doing things like locking JavaScript interop behind a message passing system and baking protection from XSS into the language.
Mostly I'd say this all encourages you to do things a better way, but it can be painful, and particularly given the early nature of the language, meeting the edges of the language can be very painful because of it.
In contrast, I adored working with Scala because it was so powerful, but it sits close to Ruby in the "you can do everything a million different ways" rankings. The more I did with it, the more I wanted a refined subset of what was there (which may be what Dotty/Scala 3 ends up being).
Things like "you must always use braces on if statements" are rules I always end up enforcing using tooling anyway because they are just bugs waiting to happen, and are the low-hanging fruit of this debate. Too many language take the approach of "if we can parse it, it's fine", when really the aim should be to make it clear not just to a parser, but to the person reading/writing the code too. Hopefully more languages are more opinionated about that kind of thing in the future.
I've done a fair amount with Elm, which is undoubtedly hugely opinionated, doing things like locking JavaScript interop behind a message passing system and baking protection from XSS into the language.
Mostly I'd say this all encourages you to do things a better way, but it can be painful, and particularly given the early nature of the language, meeting the edges of the language can be very painful because of it.
In contrast, I adored working with Scala because it was so powerful, but it sits close to Ruby in the "you can do everything a million different ways" rankings. The more I did with it, the more I wanted a refined subset of what was there (which may be what Dotty/Scala 3 ends up being).
Things like "you must always use braces on if statements" are rules I always end up enforcing using tooling anyway because they are just bugs waiting to happen, and are the low-hanging fruit of this debate. Too many language take the approach of "if we can parse it, it's fine", when really the aim should be to make it clear not just to a parser, but to the person reading/writing the code too. Hopefully more languages are more opinionated about that kind of thing in the future.