space_comrade [he/him]

deleted by creator

Most types force premature design/optimization.

I disagree. What you’re saying is true for Java-like OOP languages because OOP is actually complete garbage if you want to design good, easy to understand abstractions. Types are way more elegant in functional or functional-inspired languages.

Most unit tests lock up some specific implementation (increasing cost of inevitable refactors) rather than prevent actual bugs.

Agreed, unit tests are useless in most cases, they mostly test the bullshit abstractions you built for the unit tests themselves.

Go sacrifices too much for superficial simplicity; but I would like to see a language that’s nearly as easy to learn, but has a better type system and fewer footguns.

“Easy to learn” and “good type system” will by necessity be opposing forces IMO. If you want to work with a good type system you’re gonna have to put in the effort to learn it, I’m not sure there’s this magical formulation of a good type system that’s also intuitive for most new developers. Hope to be proven wrong one day tho but so far no dice.

Counterpoint: using anything other than ‘i’ as your index in a for loop in C or C++ is obnoxious as fuck.

At most I’ll go with ‘it’ for C++ iterators.