What precisely are you accusing your interlocutor of not understanding?

The only decisions that matter for languages that get adopted are the decisions that cause adoption.

JS went without static types, Go went without generics, PHP was just a tool for reducing html boilerplate. New languages love to stick null right in there. Rust isn't what Graydon Hoare wanted it to be. Chris Lattner called Swift a failure.

It's all up for criticism.

Sure, there are valid criticisms of anything but without understanding they're unlikely to be useful or correct.

Without criticism there's no understanding, just propaganda.

I meant, which particular design decisions are you accusing people of having failed to comprehend the rationale for?

Whatever design decisions they consider to be weird. Because it probably just means they don't know what the trade offs and goals were.

Skill? Go? With the amount of mistakes piling up over the years comparable to PHP at this point? Really??

These guys have each forgotten 10x than you know about programming.

https://swtch.com/~rsc/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Griesemer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike

Being exceptionally talented programmers does not automatically make them good language designers. I can think of a couple of people who may not be as good at programming, but are light years ahead at designing languages (and maintaining them over long term).

Fair point. The tragedy is that it could’ve been much more. But that was never the goal...