> All of these other things could be done for C++. But, importantly, they haven't. I think programmers often under-emphasize the importance of culture, so I w

> All of these other things could be done for C++. But, importantly, they haven't. I think programmers often under-emphasize the importance of culture, so I want to boost this line. Lots of "debates" around programming languages are, I think, better understood as differences in beliefs about what a language should prioritize. C++ could add an allocation checker that provides stronger memory guarantees by outlawing certain operations (or requiring they be marked a'la `unsafe`). They don't add it because, I think, they view other additions to the language as having a higher "return" on allowing people to create high quality programs. It seems to me that a lot of this comes back to first-principles about what makes a good programming language. These ideas are, to some degree, set before a line of code is written. The rust folks thought memory and concurrency safety were very important when they were designing rust - even though they couldn't have formed those opinions by using the kind of language they were making (because nothing quite like it existed yet). I also think about "infamous" qualities of languages (generics in go, the GIL in python). These ideas exist within wider cultural beliefs about what makes a good programming language. In a sense, it's inevitable that most of the people working on cpython aren't too concerned about the GIL, because they chose to work on a project that has developed around the GIL and believe its limitations are worth the gains from being able to rely on its coordinating function. The implications of this are, to me, that when advocate for languages to adopt features we'd like to see we should remember the wider cultural context. It seems silly to expect the current golang team to implement generics "the way the community wants" because they've spent years building a fully featured language that functions without generics. Culture runs deep and it's not an intellectual or professional flaw to value improvements differently than our peers.