I am not really talking about the present day, though I agree with the other comments that a lot of modern features help. Think back to the era of Lisp machine

I am not really talking about the present day, though I agree with the other comments that a lot of modern features help. Think back to the era of Lisp machines. Memory safety, macros, OO... all in the 80s! We ignored the lessons and paid the price. People, to this day, still look at you weird when you say "I think you could write a game in a garbage collected language" and don't bat an eye when you say "C is dangerous, but I was very careful." I think what killed us is that computers are expensive (and performance directly translates to the number of computers you need to buy) and security holes are free. Of course you're going to optimize for speed; optimizing for safety can save you at most zero dollars. That's just engineering.