Sounds to me like a language targeted at novice developers (and I suppose with that author means people with no programming background) should add a very strong

Sounds to me like a language targeted at novice developers (and I suppose with that author means people with no programming background) should add a very strong emphasis on simulations and notifications. Won't it be ok that program crashes if : 1. it was likely the error was catch during a simulation before deployment 2. author of code received a mail immediately to let know something bad occurred Such a language should probably be much bigger than our usual programming language and include at core what is usually added by dev tools (tests and notifications). There was a discussion on HN a few days ago on "test only development" (link has been marked "dead" since then, though), that is tests that produce code. It reminds me of what "programming" a holodeck looks like in star trek : you describe what you want and computer manage to produce code that achieves it. Without getting so far, you could ask your users to describe what data looks like in input and what it should looks like on ouput, as a core feature of the language rather than on a separated and optional layer. Then, on build, you run a "simulation" (yes, that is just testing) to ensure code behaves as expected. And you build notifications (by mail, for exemple) as a core feature of the language too, maybe even include version control (you have to think hard how to make that user friendly for your target) in order everybody has a idea of what changed before the crash (this could be reported in notification). When you have all of that, it does not matter if division by zero makes program crash.