Blaming tools doesn't mean that we can't also improve other areas, like problems with the process of programming (e.g. the things you mentioned). The thing is,

Blaming tools doesn't mean that we can't also improve other areas, like problems with the process of programming (e.g. the things you mentioned). The thing is, it's easy to improve the tools, but difficult to improve organizations and processes. In real life I can simply add a linter to a software project without asking anyone and other team members are (or should be :) okay with it. On the other hand, I can't just decide to get a security audit or corporate accountability, those things cost real money. As for your critique of certain "linter rules", you might have a point. There's of course bad linter rules. It's not a good idea (in my opinion) to require explicit casts everywhere. But those are just specific critiques against specifict rules, not a critique about the general idea of using a linter / designing a language to be safer. Updating legacy code to reflect new rules is a huge task, but you can start enforcing these rules only for the new code.