Carbon is what happens when you have a ton of experience programming in C++ and nothing else whatsoever. It is absolutely littered with joyful declarations of "hooray, we fixed this thing in C++", when in reality it absolutely bathed in the utter fictions of C++ and has no perspective on the entire universe of other things that we could base languages on.
I give it a -1 on innovation, it's so obviously stuck in a cul-de-sac in the design space that I see no hope for it. "We'll get around to memory safety eventually". Riiight.
That said, I'm glad they at least made the leap to, "Hey, we could actually use something other than C++?"
Carbon being "absolutely bathed in the utter fictions of C++" is a feature not a bug.
The goal of Carbon is explicitly _not_ to be a new general purpose programming language. In the docs, the authors even advise people to use Rust instead for greenfield projects. The goal of Carbon is to support migrating existing C++ codebases to some new safer language.
This is just so unfair to a project whose explicitly stated purpose is to be a better C++ and just that to ease the transition and porting of code from one to the other. Even they say, if you are not working with a C++ codebase, don't bother using Carbon, use something else. Great shot but make sure to aim at the target next time.
Unsafe languages are fossil fuels and Carbon is natural gas. Yeah, a small improvement over coal, but an incrementalist addition that only reduces the magnitude, not the direction. Still digging in the wrong direction, IMHO.
And I standby my original assessment that the design is very obviously lacking in long-term experience in another language.
I give it a -1 on innovation, it's so obviously stuck in a cul-de-sac in the design space that I see no hope for it. "We'll get around to memory safety eventually". Riiight.
That said, I'm glad they at least made the leap to, "Hey, we could actually use something other than C++?"