> elegant language
Are there any languages that would qualify
and are in common use in industry? I'm not interested in some PL fantasy language that no one outside of academia uses. JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PHP (see double-ended hammer!), C, C++, C#, Java, Go, Rust all have numerous warts, but are heavily used in industry. None of them are particularly elegant in 2025. In the modern era, it is impossible to separate the language itself from the standard library. Even if the language is elegant, I am sure the standard library will have all kinds of awful warts (probably date/time) -- or vice versa.
alt Hacker News
Ok so there's a couple of leaps in this argument. All languages having "warts" is not equivalent to all languages "not being elegant", for one.
The other is that not all "language warts" are equal. Few would claim the severity of the footguns are equally bad among the languages you listed.
More importantly, I think Bjarne's comment was more about C++ being hindered by its commitment to backwards compatibility and mistakes in previous design decisions getting in the way of making new designs elegant to implement. Unless you come up with a completely new syntax (Herb Sutter's cpp2) or a way to locally break backwards compatibility (Sean Baxter's Circle) C++ has forced itself into a corner.