All,
Thanks for the great responses to my OP. As someone with zero programming chops your opinions and perspectives are very informative. It certainly rounds out some understanding of what is out there, good and bad. ADA looks interesting for sure.
Originally, I was thinking of what NSa, Goog and Micros* have admitted that 70% of the hacks happening all the time come from memory unsafe problems (albeit from their own making). They use C, C++, C## and whatever else extensively.
Didn't the creator of pascal also suggested smaller OS's like his Oberon? I remember reading a paper in regards to that. "Make it simple but not simpler" I think was the mantra.
Linux has gone way away from a simple design as everyone has iterated in earlier posts especially with systemd. The older init systems were simpler than systemd by miles.
I only suggested rust because I didn't know about other languages like ada, etc. I do remember some stuff about ruby years ago but I am not someone who could even understand the basics of BASIC very much!
Great stuff!
73
Charles