I absolutely believe that languages matter and are the best hope for improving code quality and productivity overall. We need better languages.
But the way we get there is not to pick some small but critical bug that could be avoided by an arbitrary style change and declare that a language which does not suffer that stylistic pitfall is superior. The new language may have much worse flaws. You're just playing language flaw whack-a-mole at that point.
If we want to improve we have to get a sense of what types of bugs are most common across all programs and reason from a logical standpoint about how they may be prevented. This will solve orders of magnitude more problems than fiddling around with the syntax to minimize the number of typos people make.
But the way we get there is not to pick some small but critical bug that could be avoided by an arbitrary style change and declare that a language which does not suffer that stylistic pitfall is superior. The new language may have much worse flaws. You're just playing language flaw whack-a-mole at that point.
If we want to improve we have to get a sense of what types of bugs are most common across all programs and reason from a logical standpoint about how they may be prevented. This will solve orders of magnitude more problems than fiddling around with the syntax to minimize the number of typos people make.