I think that is the wrong argument, though. Trying to develop a language that tries to not let you do bad things gives you something like Java instead, where do

I think that is the wrong argument, though. Trying to develop a language that tries to not let you do bad things gives you something like Java instead, where doing anything is cumbersome (and still doesn't succeed in preventing bad things from being written). There is a lot of bad PHP code because there are a lot of people who start hacking using PHP. However, any language somebody first starts hacking in will result in ugly code (you should have seen my Scheme code when I first started with that in college! :). Unfortunately, the idea of "teaching languages" doesn't really work, because people want to continue using what they've already learned. (BTW, I don't think you deserved downvotes. You are continuing the conversation, after all, not trolling. I really think we need to make downvoting more painful.)