I take your points. C gives a lot of freedom, but all things are not possible. I think what comes to mind for me is when I see the idea of trying to limit solutions to use only certain certain "design patterns", I usually would go in the direction of more freedom and less rules.

On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 3:24 PM Luther Johnson <luther@makerlisp.com> wrote:

I'm talking more about where the intent is to invest languages with more "safety", "good practices", to bake certain preferences into language features, so that writers no longer recognize these as engineering choices, and the language as a means of expression of any choice we might make, but that the language has built-in "the right way" to do things, and if the program compiles and runs at all, then it must be safe and working in certain respects.

ORLY?  Do you reject C, then, because it does not support self-modifying code or the ability to jump into the middle of a procedure without going through the prologue?  These are baked-in preferences, and if a C program compiles at all, you can be sure that it does neither of these things, even if it would benefit your program greatly if they were available.

Some people would say that's exactly what the new dialects bring us, but I see too much artificial orthodoxy invented last week, and too many declarations of the "one true way", in many of the most recent languages, for my taste.

Since you agree that it is a matter of taste, there can of course be no disputing it.