[kbenson]

Unfortunately, I think this speaks more towards the failing humans have towards assessing risk in complex systems. The cheaper to learn (considering time and effort required) languages that provide less safeguards routinely get far more new users over time. These languages can be useful in their ease of use (hey, I'm a Perl programmer, so I can't knock them entirely), but they have a far wider share of the market than I think is warranted.

[btilly]

ahem

PHP

[kbenson]

Indeed.[1]

There's definitely a trade-off between on-boarding new programmers and teaching good software engineering practices. I think that programming language mind-share is so overvalued at this point that to some degree we are shooting ourselves in the foot. There's some point at which the number of new users you can get based on how easy your language is to learn and the average quality of the software produced in that language are at an equilibrium[2], and I think we've seen a few languages which have blown straight past that equilibrium.

1: As I suspect most Perl programmers feel when they've had to spend time writing PHP, the event can be infuriating. Here's a language that purported to take a lot of ideas from Perl, and all you can conclude is they took all the wrong things.

2: Obviously affected by other language traits as well. I think Python keeps a higher average of quality than you would think likely though strict dogmatism, so that works well for them, even if it doesn't attract me.