[Vampiero]

There's a difference in mentality between people who make either argument.

The "PL-elitist" crowd looks at programming languages from a computer science perspective, while the "PL-pragmatist" crowd (for lack of a better term) looks at it from a workplace perspective. At least that's how I see it.

In other words, one group writes tooling and libraries; the other writes business applications using said tooling and libraries.

One paradigm invites complex, highly expressive code as to minimize the chance of unforeseen errors (even if just by having a smaller codebase), and as to provide a clean and powerful interface that "does more with less".

The other invites simple, highly maintainable code as to minimize the training overhead of new employees and the chance that their lack of rigor might end up accidentally introducing or reintroducing bugs. Furthermore, a simpler language means that new teams can hop onto a pre-existing project faster, because they don't have to scrutinize each LOC to the same extent.

I might be wrong on any or all of this, but that's how I perceive it.