Is there a name for a fallacy like "appeal to stupidity" or something where the argument against using a tool that's fit for the job boils down to "All developers are too dumb to use this/you need to read a manual/it's hard" etc etc?
I think there is something to be said about having good defaults and tools that don't force you to be on every last detail 100% lest they get out of control.
It also depends on the team, some teams have a high density of seasoned experts who've made the mistakes and know what to avoid but I think the history on mem vulns show that it's very hard to keep that bar consistently across large codebases or disperse teams.
This is ultimately the crux of the issue. If Google, Microsoft, Apple, whatever, cannot manage to hire engineers that can write safe c/c++ all the time (as has been demonstrated repeatedly), it’s time to question whether the model itself makes sense for most use cases.
Grandparent can’t argue that these top tier engineers aren’t RTFM here. Of course they are. Even after the manual reading they still cannot manage to write perfectly safe code. Because it is extremely hard to do
Personally my argument would be the problems at the low level are just hard problems and doing them in rust you'll change one set of problems of memory safety to another set of problems probably of unexpected behaviour with memory layouts and lifetimes at the very low level.
It's not that all developers are dumb/stupid. It's that even the smartest developers make mistakes and thus having a safety net that can catch damaging mistakes is helpful.
I've read several posts here where people say things like "this is badly designed becausw it assumes people read the documentation".
???????
Yes you need to read the docs. That is programming 101. If you have vim set up properly then you can open the man page for the identifier under your cursor in a single keypress. There is ZERO excuse not to read the manual. There is no excuse not to check error messages. etc.
Yet we consistently see people that want everything babyproofed.
On the other hand, there's no excuse for designers & developers (or their product manager, if that's the one in authority) not to work their ass off on the ergonomics/affordance of the tools they release to any public (be it end users or developers, which are the end users of the tool makers, etc.).
It benefits literally everyone: the users, the product reputation & value, the builders reputation, the support team, etc.
Do people read the docs? Often, no, they don't. So, are you creating tools for the people we have, or for the people you think we should have? If the latter, you are likely to find that your tool makes less impact than you think it should.
Computer languages are not tools for illiterates. You need to learn what you're doing. And yet, programmers do so less than we think they should. If we don't license programmers (to weed out the under-trained), then we're going to have to deal with languages being used by people who didn't read the docs. We should give at least some thought to having them degrade gracefully in that situation.
