No need to apologise at all. I’m still insisting on using social media exactly for this kind of exchange.

And I do get what you mean. My (admittedly small) experience with C involved some decompilation and FPGA work, but ultimately it was mostly about package management. And as you said, due to the very nature and culture of C, even for core dependencies like libc this grew into a lot of work, and things eventually evolved to put the ball back in the developer’s court with standards such as Flatpak.

Your observation is more than valid: by their very nature, Java and Go sit somewhere between C and JavaScript.

The problem is that as the boundaries between OS and browser, privileged and unprivileged, backend and frontend (and now chat stuff due to AI) blur, and as utilitarian code development explodes and eats the world, the whole division of concerns becomes a grey area. That’s when “utilitarian” code can end up doing a lot of damage.

For example, when a JavaScript dependency running in an app, inside a JavaScript engine theoretically sandboxed in the browser can steal a hot wallet or bank account credentials, we really need to rethink how much the division between privileged, mission-critical code and unprivileged, “low-risk” utilitarian code actually holds in practice. Which brings us back to the point of finding balance.

If you ask this dev over here, with the unavoidable downfall of some of the big techs behind the "move fast and break things movement", the balance will likely swing back towards caution for a while. But I’m notoriously bad at extrapolation, so take my views with a grain of salt ad be equally prepared for a future where what we do becomes a dying art.