First of Schirp's three thresholds. The baseline guarantees you get 'batteries-included' from your chosen language: in Haskell with a sophisticated type system, code literally won't compile below this bar; in C, GCC must produce a binary; in assembly, the assembler must read it; in Ruby, essentially only that it parses and eventually boots. Everything degenerates to the ecosystem threshold over time unless work is put in. The lower the threshold, the more the team must invest above it to reach a helpful contribution. Defaults and the standard library matter disproportionately because systems statistically regress to defaults at scale — Ruby's permissive runtime (monkey patches, redefinable operators, method_missing, eval) keeps dragging this threshold down in practice.