At Facebook they name certain "escape hatch" functions in a way that inescapably make them look like a GIANT EYESORE. Stuff like DANGEROUSLY_CAST_THIS_TO_THAT, or INVOKE_SUPER_EXPENSIVE_ACTION_SEE_YOU_ON_CODE_REVIEW. This really drives home the point that such things must not be used except in rare extraordinary cases.

If unwrap() were named UNWRAP_OR_PANIC(), it would be used much less glibly. Even more, I wish there existed a super strict mode when all places that can panic are treated as compile-time errors, except those specifically wrapped in some may_panic_intentionally!() or similar.

Unwrap isn't a synonym for laziness, it's just like an assertion, when you do unwrap() you're saying the Result should NEVER fail, and if does, it should abort the whole process. What was wrong was the developer assumption, not the use of unwrap.

It's a little subtler than this. You want it to be easy to not handle an error while developing, so you can focus on getting the core logic correct before error-handling; but you want it to be hard to deploy or release the software without fully handling these checks. Some kind of debug vs release mode with different lints seems like a reasonable approach.

So… basically every language ever?

Except maybe Haskell.

In Rust, `.unwrap()` is nine characters, whereas propagating the Result via `?` is one.

All languages with few exceptions have these kinds of escape hatches like unwrap

This is untrue. A `?` operator would have done just fine here. I agree with you though that it should be possible to explicitely forbid unwraps.