> many important language features boil down to forcing users to do the right thing
this just causes the users to use another language for their projects instead
And fixing the output of that is where the rest of us often profit from.
A language that provides a lot of freedom when it comes to expressiveness without offering much in the way of constraints (to truly convey the purpose of a given piece of code with the least amount of ambiguity possible) will almost definitely turn into utter crap in contact with junior developers, and will often be a source of pain for more experienced ones once the project is nontrivial, whether they realize it or not.
Do you see any problems with optimizing everything we do for junior developers? I mean, most of us aren't, and it would be really nice if someone gave a crap about wasting our lives as well.
It's not necessary optimizing for junior developers. When properly implemented, language hand-holding is a tool for "better" programmers as well. I find that my brain capacity is limited, and the more I can focus it on issues that are productive rather than eg. tracking the liveness status of my data or potential system-wide effects messing with it, the more useful work I can perform.
Not to mention working together with more junior people, in which case it will be you doing the hand-holding instead, because the tools don't
Sure there is, many important language features boil down to forcing users to do the right thing (not necessarily the easy thing).
In highly concurrent languages like Go, there’s not always a meaningful stack to unwind, and you end up having to pass error values around anyway. So I can easily sympathize with the decision to stick with one mechanism for error handling.