[tel]

What is the barrier to "stupidity" in a language. In Haskell there is a deliberate, powerful barrier in the form of a compiler which will yell at you repeatedly until you stop violating the constraints encoded in the types. You either learn to work along the lines laid out by the types or you cheat.

To cheat you import a module called System.IO.Unsafe or Unsafe.Coerce and get sudden access to a magic hammer. If you use it to subvert the type system in a dramatic way then you'll immediately get so many massive runtime errors that you'll be forced to rescind. If you use it on a project that enforces -XSafe then the compiler will still reject you.

To get past both of those barriers you probably have to have a really, really great desire to break the system or a deep understanding of why and when it's valuable to use these unsafe types.

Again, nothing is actually stopping a terrifically bad programmer from breaking your statics, but there are a lot of things making their life much harder in the process.

The wager is that you can detect and avoid people who are willing to cross higher barriers much more easily.

[dllthomas]

Also, it's much easier to notice and reject a patch that imports Unsafe stuff than it is to notice and reject a patch that has a subtle type error.