I&#x27;m pretty you would pass whatever sort of bar exam for a &quot;Low Level Programming&quot; certification they might deign to thrown at you. You&#x27;re the 0.001%. (Although 0.001% might be the wrong number—I&#x27;d hazard 0.1%, or maybe even as high as 0.5%.)<p>Which is to say, your story matches my hypothetical pretty well. You effectively created the same structure as Rust has, where there are safe and unsafe sublanguages, and the &quot;master&quot; developers thoroughly audited any code implemented in the unsafe sublanguage.<p>Which makes my point: there exist a small set of people qualified to write in &quot;full C&quot;, and a much-larger set of people who aren&#x27;t; and the only way—if you&#x27;re a person who isn&#x27;t qualified—to write C that doesn&#x27;t fall down, is with the guidance and leadership of a person who is.<p>Though I think maybe your thesis statement agrees with that, so maybe I&#x27;m not arguing with you. Not <i>all</i> the developers on a given project need to be from the qualified set, no. But at least <i>some</i> of the developers need to be from the qualified set, and the other developers need to consider the qualified ones&#x27; guidance—especially on what C features to use or avoid—to be law for the project. As long as they stay within those guidelines, they&#x27;re really working within a DSL the &quot;master&quot; developers constructed, not in C. And nobody ever said you can&#x27;t make an idiot-proof DSL <i>on top of</i> C; just that, if you need <i>everything</i> C offers, your the only good option is to remove the idiots. :)