C absolutely is a language by/for people who know what they are doing. The fact that so many people are using it for so many things where modern safer languages

C absolutely is a language by/for people who know what they are doing. The fact that so many people are using it for so many things where modern safer languages now exist is not a failing of C or its designers... Regarding misusing the set functions: There is no busy work. Instead of (set/intersect some-set some-list) you just need to do (set/intersect some-set (set some-list)) to explicitly opt in to the speed tradeoff of performing set operations on lists. > is a bad idea and those that propagate it should feel bad. I don't feel bad about it at all. If Clojure hadn't followed the garbage-in/garbage-out strategy, it would have been too slow for production use. If they had added strong types early or Racket-style (read: slow) contracts, then we'd never have had the years of experience that led to the design of spec, which is new take on the problem space. In the case of the set functions, the right thing _can not_ be inferred automatically without a speed tradeoff.