Right, I understand that big corporations are pushing a new systems programming language that they say saves programmers from their own mistakes. My question was whether any programmers actually asked for it, and if so, which ones?
> We use languages that impose other “arbitrary” constraints on us
> The ownership model is a similar concept [to type checking]
Except we didn't. K&R rejected Pascal for their work on Unix precisely because it was too strongly typed and didn't provide sufficient escape hatches. Arrays were typed by length, there was no pointer arithmetic, there was little or no typecasting or coercion, no generic pointer types, no null pointers, etc.
All these restrictions that were in place to create a safer language made Pascal completely unsuited to writing allocators, buffered IO, and other OS internals. So instead, they ditched Pascal and created C and had Unix up in running in just a couple of years. Maybe there's a lesson there.
> We use languages that impose other “arbitrary” constraints on us
> The ownership model is a similar concept [to type checking]
Except we didn't. K&R rejected Pascal for their work on Unix precisely because it was too strongly typed and didn't provide sufficient escape hatches. Arrays were typed by length, there was no pointer arithmetic, there was little or no typecasting or coercion, no generic pointer types, no null pointers, etc.
All these restrictions that were in place to create a safer language made Pascal completely unsuited to writing allocators, buffered IO, and other OS internals. So instead, they ditched Pascal and created C and had Unix up in running in just a couple of years. Maybe there's a lesson there.