[catnaroek]

> It is easy to pick up, understand and use. But it is also very error prone

These two sentences are badly in conflict. How can you say you “understand” something if you find yourself repeatedly making mistakes when you use it?

[glennsl]

Compare a hammer and nails to a nailgun with various safety mechanisms. Which one do you think is easier to understand, and which is more prone to sore fingers?

[catnaroek]

> Which one do you think is easier to understand?

For a toolmaker, the hammer. For a user, the nailgun.

Also, there's a qualitative difference between physical tools and programming languages. The design of a physical tool can only lessen the likelihood of an accident and/or the seriousness of its consequences, but never entirely rule them out - that's why they're called “accidents”. On the other hand, programming languages can be designed to treat logical errors as invalid code. A program that doesn't compile is completely guaranteed not to corrupt your data, reveal your passwords to hackers, etc.

[glennsl]

What if you can't understand the logic of the compiler, and therefore aren't able to write any code in the language at all? Sure it's not very error-prone, but it's also not very useful.

I'm a big fan of Rust precisely because of its safety features. Even if you don't need manual memory management there are huge benefits to resource management safety that no other language can provide. But I still recognize that there's a trade-off here.