[mempko]

Why would a well designed language have only one or few ways to do the same thing? Seems rather arbitrary. I like when I have many ways to do the same thing.

Imagine if you told a writer or poet that English is bad because there is more than one way to say the same thing...

Programming languages are for people more than machines. Machines are happy with microcode.

[justanotheratom]

RE: Why would a well designed language have only one or few ways to do the same thing?

So that you focus on solving the problem at hand, instead of endlessly arguing over decisions that are irrelevant to solving the said problem.

[mempko]

That's the thing though, each similar problem is subtly different. Those differences can matter and the language should allow you to model them.