It's incredible the "right" response to OPs comment isn't "for all the great benefits we've had, we've also really f'ed up programing along the way". Instead

It's incredible the "right" response to OPs comment isn't "for all the great benefits we've had, we've also really f'ed up programing along the way". Instead it's "yes it's my fault that I forgot about the nonsensical concepts of positive and negative zero, and that the associative operation of addition isn't actually associative, and that addition's identity isn't actually and identity..." Scheme has Numerical towers that automatically abstract over exact numeric representations, but instead this clearly smart engine is forced to spend mental cycles remembering and debugging this arbitrary special case logic. Nulls, floating point, ... we really have some huge programming mistakes that have cost so much time over the years. An no this isn't a rant on 'everybody should use scheme or Lisp, because that completely misses the point. It's that 'Worse Is Better' really is worse in the long run.