[switchbak]

Well some of the great ideas of yesteryear are having a bit of a rebirth. Many of the safety concerns of Ada are being brought into the limelight with Rust. And of course Erlang blew up a while back after spending forever in the (relative) shadows.

Overall we're still stuck in a bit of a near-monoculture of JS(TS) and Python, but it's a far cry from back in the day where there was very little openness to the sole blessed corporate stack (Typically Java or C#/CLR). I think we can only handle so many mainstream languages, but I do love all the experimentation and openness going on.

[livrem]

My impression from my limited experience with Pascal (more recently only playing around a bit with Free Pascal) is that much of the basic parts of the language, that a beginner like me is mostly exposed to, is very safe with strong typing and range-checking on all arrays. I do not know how far you can get in practical programming while sticking to those parts of the language, or how unsafe it gets once you start playing with pointers? I think the pointers are supposed to at least be safer than in C, unless you go out of your way to break things?