Just to be clear - I don't suspect that the things that pretend to replace C are bad, or no good. I've just seen multiple "pretenders to the throne"[1] and what would appear to have happened is that we just moved the pathology around.

[1] please excuse the horrible metaphor.

After a few iterations of that, one begins to think that perhaps this is a distinctly human problem that is not necessarily addressable by improved language systems.

My greatest concern is that I keep seeing people learn the same things, over and over, on the job. There's no real repository of literature to actually address any of this - each engineer appears to have to learn it mostly from scratch.

There's a famous bon mot from pubic choice economics - "something must be done; this is something; this must be done." I just hope all the new crop of languages are not that.

Finally: If you can, and if you can learn the right patterns ( isn't that true of all languages, though?), the thing I have gone to, again and again that is better than test equipment in terms of reliability continues to be Tcl.