This opinion gets tossed around a lot, but I've found the opposite to be true, in part because all projects trend towards becoming an unholy mess as they grow large, so being able to accomplish a goal in significantly fewer lines of code has tangible benefits.
If there actually is a correlation between high level languages and "trouble", it may be just because a high level language lets a less experienced developer (or team of developers) get farther than they otherwise would in some lower level language, i.e. the more cumbersome nature of a lower level language forces you to follow best practices earlier or the whole thing never gets off the ground, while the same sloppy devs + a higher level language might actually get as far as shipping something.
Whether that is ultimately better is debatable, but the problem is more how the tool is being used than something inherent in the tool itself.
> all projects trend towards becoming an unholy mess as they grow large, so being able to accomplish a goal in significantly fewer lines of code has tangible benefits
This is a really good point that I didn't realize before - sure, languages like bash and Lua and Tcl might scale very poorly to large codebases, but because they're more expressive than some other languages (coughjavacough), you might be able to implement the functionality you need without needing a large codebase in the first place.
If there actually is a correlation between high level languages and "trouble", it may be just because a high level language lets a less experienced developer (or team of developers) get farther than they otherwise would in some lower level language, i.e. the more cumbersome nature of a lower level language forces you to follow best practices earlier or the whole thing never gets off the ground, while the same sloppy devs + a higher level language might actually get as far as shipping something.
Whether that is ultimately better is debatable, but the problem is more how the tool is being used than something inherent in the tool itself.