Haskell as an excellent example of a language that, by design, filters out probably many well-meaning individuals who don't have the requisite level of high-level skill.

Languages like Java, BASIC, PHP, etc are easy to get started with, which means those languages attract all types. Perl is somewhat in this class too, along with C++ due to that language's widespread popularity.

In PHP's case, the language's lack of inherent default-to-paranoia security settings has bitten it hard, because no real consideration was given to these phenomena (or apparently anything else, but that's a different story).

It's a nuanced (social) issue, but solving the type safety problem does make it generally easier not to shoot your foot when you still don't know what you're doing. The hope is that the programmer steadily advances beyond the baby-steps/worsethanfailure.com stage - and doesn't build any large systems that are too big to rewrite before they're decent.

Languages like Haskell, Lisp/Scheme, Erlang, C, assembly language, etc are generally difficult to do large-scale useful things with unless you've either studied the language a lot and/or already have programming experience.

At least that's the theory. Thinking about it, there are probably people out there who can nail things like memory management but are terrible at eg higher-level application architecture to such an extent that they're ultimately not competent engineers anyway. It's possible at least.

(My primary dev platform is 32-bit, so I can't take HHVM seriously.)