[constantcrying]

>Common answers to this question will include words like abstraction, performance, convenience, usability etc. The problem with these answers is that apart from the measurable, they are all subjective, aesthetic choices.

That just is not true at all. These are all legitimate engineering tradeoffs, which any serious project has to balance. Calling this "aesthetics" is completely dishonest. These aren't arbitrary categories, these are meaningful distinctions engineers use when evaluating tools to write software. I think the students better understand what programming languages are than the teacher.

If you accept that a programming language is a tool and not just an academic game of terms, then all these questions have clear answers.

[Rochus]

> These are all legitimate engineering tradeoffs

Agree, and we actually have both the standards and established methods to conduct representative tradeoff studies. But this knowledge is mostly ignored by CS and programming language designs. Even for Ada, there was little empirical evidence for specific design decision. A systematic survey discovered only 22 randomized controlled trials of textual programming language features conducted between the early 1950s through 2012, across six decades. This staggering scarcity explains why language designers rely heavily on intuition rather than evidence (see e.g. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~NatProg/programminglanguageusability...).