[tom_mellior]

Why do people keep thinking that "systems programming" is a term with a well-defined meaning?

I've seen it used for anything from operating system kernels to database systems to anything that talks to the network to command-line utilities like ls.

Garbage-collected languages are fine for all of these except maybe kernels. But even there, you might use a system that lets you do critical sections in a mode where the GC is disabled, or in a sublanguage that is guaranteed to be GC-free.