[eladbenisrael]

Actually I really love C++ :-) Just spent some time at Core C++ in Tel-Aviv and was so inspired by the community and depth and incredible innovation that's still happening around this language.

But there's actually a specific technical reason why we realized we need a new language: it's because cloud systems are distributed. They are a composition of both infrastructure and application code. Not just one of them.

Existing languages (including my beloved C++) have a fundamental assumption that a program is executed on a single machine. This means that whenever you exit the machine boundary (e.g. call a service), the compiler basically says adios and leaves the room. Now the onus is on the developer to stitch the components together.

And that happens A LOT in the cloud. More and more as you transfer responsibilities from your application code to managed services. Isn't that what the cloud is all about?

The power of compilation is the safety you get from linking decoupled components together. This is exactly what it's doing for "traditional computers" today. Two functions in memory are effectively decoupled (they are just two sequences of opcodes in memory). And so compilers and linkers were invented to check that when I call function A from function B I give it the right number and type of arguments at a very very early stage.