[spease]

> Surely everyone would want such a key piece of technology to be air tight and easy to debug

1. Tragedy of the Commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons) / Bystander Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect)

2. In practice, the risk of introducing a breakage probably makes upstream averse to refactoring for aesthetics alone; you’d need to prove that there’s a functional bug. But of course, you’re less likely to notice a functional bug if the aesthetic is so bad you can’t follow the code. And when people need a new feature, that will get shoehorned in while changing as little code as possible, because nobody fully understands why everything is there. Especially when execution speed is a potential attack vector.

So maybe shades of the trolley problem too - people would rather passively let multiple bugs exist, than be actively responsible for introducing one.

[bsimpson]

I wonder what adoption would actually look like.

It reminds me of Google Dart, which was originally pitched as an alternate language that enabled web programming in the style Google likes (strong types etc.). There was a loud cry of scope creep from implementors and undo market influence in places like Hacker News. It was so poorly received that Google rescinded the proposal to make it a peer language to JavaScript.

Granted, the interests point in different directions for security software v.s. a mainstream platform. Still, audiences are quick to question the motives of companies that have the scale to invest in something like making a net-new security runtime.

[khafra]

> undo market influence

Pointless nitpick, but you want "undue market influence." "Undo market influence" is what the FTC orders when they decide there's monopolistic practices going on.

[dalmo3]

Not pointless. I had no idea what the original wording meant.