[Chris_Newton]

But the syntax is precisely the only thing a language can give you that a library cannot.

This might be true on a similar level to all Turing-complete languages being equivalent, but I’m not sure how useful it is beyond that level. For example, the features that a language provides as directly supported building blocks and the guarantees a language makes about how certain entities will or won’t behave and relate to each other profoundly affects the developer’s experience. That remains true even if some of those features could eventually have been recreated with a library modulo syntax and even if a perfect programmer would always use them properly and never rely on the language to prevent a mistake.