[saghm]

I took a course in college where we used Coq to build up an imperative programming language, and I waa surprised how much you could do (i.e. essentially anything you needed to) with a non-Turing complete language. I think that the traditional computer science curriculum makes such a big deal about Turing machines (and not necessarily wrongly so) that students just assume that Turning completeness is a natural goal to strive for rather than just a property with tradeoffs, just like any other property. It certainly doesn't help that it seems harder to create a language that's not Turing complete than one that is, at least if you aren't explicitly trying to avoid it; just look at all the random things that have been discovered to be accidentally Turing complete over the years.