To be fair ... For any given programming task, there is a fixed (minimum) amount of work to do to solve it correctly, and the programmer's design choices merel

To be fair ... For any given programming task, there is a fixed (minimum) amount of work to do to solve it correctly, and the programmer's design choices merely decide the distribution of that work among the environment, the compiler, the standard library, the third-party libraries, and the programmer herself. Meaning, that in order to use the programmer's time most effectively per unit of task difficulty, the language itself should be such that the compiler does as much work as it possibly can. Such a compiler simply won't be small, and probably won't be fast either. (imho the best it can or should do in the face of a syntactically-valid non-program, is to give as many errors at once as are applicable, so that the programmer can fix them all in one go) Rust, of course, in the grandly oversimplified view, takes this tradeoff in the same direction as Swift, and I'm sure you're familiar with all the ways that Rust is better for it ... and even a few ways that Rust is worse for doing the opposite. :) (Though, then again, there's miri, for those that value correctness over performance. Unless it too has changed names.)