People have a finite amount of time and effort they can spend on making the code correct. When the language is full of traps, spec gotchas, antiquated misfeatur

People have a finite amount of time and effort they can spend on making the code correct. When the language is full of traps, spec gotchas, antiquated misfeatures, gratuitous platform differences, fragmented build systems, then a lot of effort is wasted just on managing all of that nonsense that is actively working against writing robust code, and it takes away from the effort to make a quality product beyond just the language-wrangling. You can't rely on people being perfect all the time. We've been trying that for 50 years, and only got an endless circle of CVEs and calls to find better programmers next time. The difference is how the language reacts to the mistakes that will happen. It could react with "oops, you've made a mistake! Here, fix this", and let the programmer apply a fix and move on, shipping code without the bug. Or the language could silently amplify smallest mistakes in the least interesting code into corruption that causes catastrophic security failures. When concatenating strings and adding numbers securely is a thing that exists, and a thing that requires top-skilled programmers, you're just wasting people's talent on dumb things.