Agreed. I went through my phase of geeking out on Lisp and playing with programming languages for the sake of the language itself. But in the end it wasn't very satisfactory. I prefer building things.
At a later job my views got reinforced by a team who were so excited about Scala (many years ago when it was particularly bad, not sure if it is better now) and all the language tricks they could do in it. So we spent tons of time on "stupid programmer tricks" (Letterman-style) and debugging obscure language constructs, less time on the actual working product.
So I don't want clever programmers on my teams nor clever languages. Give me mature ecosystem, great tooling and simple code. Java and C remain the gold standard for getting things done.
At a later job my views got reinforced by a team who were so excited about Scala (many years ago when it was particularly bad, not sure if it is better now) and all the language tricks they could do in it. So we spent tons of time on "stupid programmer tricks" (Letterman-style) and debugging obscure language constructs, less time on the actual working product.
So I don't want clever programmers on my teams nor clever languages. Give me mature ecosystem, great tooling and simple code. Java and C remain the gold standard for getting things done.