I just do not happen to agree with the crowd that seems to be believe the only value that matters is safety. I think there are many other values that are in tension with safety and that these should be more reasonably balanced against one another. I sincerely hope that Rust does not represent the end of history for programming language evolution.
That said, I think you raise a really useful historical perspective. C did indeed feel like dead weight to many people. There were many detractors who felt computers weren't (and would never be) fast enough for such a high level language to be practical and as languages became more and more high level, there have been very similar concerns raised at every rung.
We have recently entered a period where natural human language is the input that resolves at least some subset of software creation problems.
But I am immensely encouraged to see Swift and Hylo and Vale all taking swings at the same problem space with very different emphases and approaches, and while I differ with Zig on some fundamentals I can totally imagine a language that grabs many of its good ideas along many of those from Rust which Zig drops, and goes somewhere better than either has managed so far.
I don't, though, agree at all about natural language solving problems here—rather the opposite, in fact. I think that in many cases, things like memory safety (and other kinds of safety!) are going to be more important to solve at language and framework level in a world where there is massively more code generated by prompting LLMs.
I completely agree with you about natural language not solving the problem. That was a sentence out of a much larger paragraph that I deleted and then mistakenly submitted on my way out the door.
Thanks for catching it!