[Afty]

You're getting some flack for this, but I agree with you based on what we've seen with Error Prone. The people who design programming languages are human, and they make mistakes. Unfortunately, if your language becomes successful, it becomes nearly impossible to fix these mistakes while retaining backwards compatibility.

Many of our checks are essentially working around problems with the language or API design. For example, our ForOverride checker (http://errorprone.info/bugpattern/ForOverride) addresses the fact that existing Java visibility modifiers are not expressive enough for some things the Guava team wanted to do. Our HashtableContains checker (http://errorprone.info/bugpattern/HashtableContains) addresses an issue with a poorly-named method in the old Hashtable API, which really should be deprecated but is infeasible given the old code that uses it.