> I don't think intentionally preventing the programmer
> from doing certain things the computer is capable of
> doing on the theory it makes errors impossible makes
> sense.
With arguments like this, we'd all be back in the days of non-structured programming languages (enjoy writing all your crypto in MUMPS). Every modern language, including C, restricts itself in some way in order to make programs more predictable and errors less likely. Some simply impose more restrictions than others, though these restrictions can actually make programs
more efficient (see, for instance, alias analysis in Fortran vs. alias analysis in C).
> somebody has to deal with the pointers and raw memory
> because that's the way computers work
All three of the languages listed previously (Rust, Ada, ATS) are systems programming languages with the capability of manipulating pointers and raw memory (though I don't personally have any experience with the latter two). What they have in common is that they provide compile-time guarantees that certain aspects of your code are correct: for example, the guarantee that you never attempt to access freed memory. These are static checks that require no runtime to perform, and impose no overhead on running code.