Better design alleviates the problem out of the gate, for a system-specific solution. But if our best solution is people gotta get smarter... man, I don't know what to say.

As someone who supports ordinary programmers, expecting smarts is not the right track. expecting average and mistakes is the right track. If your foundation is not robust by default, your systems will not be robust by default either.

To mix metaphors: Better to design foundations that keep the gloves on by default, then when you need to, take them off. You can see that design philosophy in Mercurial.

Suppose - for argument's sake - that C had two different pointer types: checked pointers for arrays and unchecked pointers for arbitrary memory and that conversions between the two were relatively seamless. What difference would that make, 97% of the time?