I could have been more precise when I said it's easy to fool yourself into thinking you know _any_ language better than you do... both rustc and ghc have made it abundantly and repeatedly clear that I don't know Rust and Haskell well, and the "if it compiles, it's probably correct" trust that develops from that frustration is a great asset to both those languages.

But those are exceptions: I've definitely felt like I've known more than I really did about at least C, C++, Java, Scheme, Python, Go, bash, Javascript, cron, and several assembly variants, and those platforms did little to stop me from learning about my inexperience in difficult, sometimes embarrassing, sometimes expensive ways.

I'm a big fan of more compile time analysis any way it can be done, and whatever can't at runtime. More types, more proofs, more fuzzing, more sanitizers, and also where possible, more restricted execution models than Turing-complete. Any code that can't prove itself correct is a serious liability. I just also like C... it's got many footguns, yes indeed, it's practically constructed out of only footguns, but there are only like 8 of them, and they're all right there waiting for you to get to know them. It's like having a few good sharp knives in your kitchen. You get to know each well, using them one at a time---and if any is missing from the block you pause everything and look around very carefully.