Author here.

So I see your counter points are all "so just don't do that, then".

And the point of my post is that this particular "just don't do that, then" has never been achieved by humans.

If if there's no example of a program without these bugs in a language, then I do think it's fair to blame the language. A knife with 16 blades and no handle.

> Expecting C to handle "address zero" in physical memory in ways that conflict with NULL in source code denotes a complete lack of understanding of what a program is.

Like the post says, it's rare that programmers actually want a pointer to memory address zero. But in my experience most programmers who even encounter that have this "complete lack of understanding", as you put it.

"Just don't do that" is the correct approach to errors, even when they are easy to overlook and the programming language provides many opportunities for mistakes.

For example, you seem to underestimate how wrong placing negative values in a signed char is: ordinary character encodings do not use negative codes, so either those negative values are not characters and they have no business being treated as such, or something strange and experimental is going on.