> "The talk I referenced talks about how the opposite is often true. Tools that result in objectively simpler systems can come with a initially steeper learning curve."
I'm aware of Rich Hickey and Clojure. In my experience with Lisps, although they are superficially simple, they make you do more abstraction work than is necessary in more commonly used high-level imperative languages. Lisp seems to strongly encourage building a high number of helper functions, which is fine if you're highly opinionated about how a job should be done, and less so if you just want to import some battle-tested libraries and write something that gets the job done. I suspect this is where the learning curve with Clojure really comes in, in that it's more closely related to being learn how to architect an application in a Lisp-friendly way than it is about getting familiar with the language.
