[0xFFFE]

C is generally better because it doesn't treat you with kid gloves, if you don't know what you are doing you will get fucked in the ass. That said, any competent engineer would know what tool to use to solve a given problem. You don't use a sledge hammer to fix a watch.

[pjmlp]

Butchers are also free not to wear metal glovers, if they lose part of the hand because they don't know what they are doing, tought luck.

Any competent butcher will never cut themselves.

[0x008]

I agree, the tools should make it very clear what implications using a certain feature has (e.g. unsafe in rust).

[pjmlp]

C did it already in 1979, yet people keep ignoring it.

> Although the first edition of K&R described most of the rules that brought C's type structure to its present form, many programs written in the older, more relaxed style persisted, and so did compilers that tolerated it. To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions.

https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

[tialaramex]

We've been here before with other aspects of human behaviour.

If you really don't want people to do it, make it impossible and then they can't. You can't write an integer overflow in WUFFS because that doesn't compile. You can't use your Google.com WebAuthn credentials to sign into fakegoogle.example, even if you really, really want to, even if you're 100% sure this is a good idea, it can't be done. Any time you stop short of this, you mustn't really want people to stop doing it and so they won't.

The next strongest defence, still not used often enough, is to make it very annoying to do things that are a bad idea. Default deny for example, the compiler obliges you to go in and explicitly allow the obviously bad thing you've done each and every single time you do it. A DLR train can be driven in fully manual mode instead of being automated, but it goes annoyingly slowly if you do that.

Linting is far below the visibility of even compiler warnings, most of your target audience will never see the message. It's not even "Do not look into laser with remaining eye" but more like a "Caution: Eye hazard" warning written inside the never-opened instruction manual.

[pjmlp]

Agreed, the only way to enforce something is to make part of the type system, and that is how we land on C folks complaining about straightjacket programming languages.

[Koshkin]

NB straitjacket. (The word "strait", in this context, means "confinement".)