Yes. The only people for whom this is controversial are message board nerds. The actual language designers don't have much trouble over the concept. Here's a link to the designers of Rust, C++, Go, and D on a panel having little problem working through the nuances:
This perpetual debate reminds me of the trouble HN used to have with the concepts of "contractors" and "consultants", where any time someone mentioned that they were doing consulting work there'd be an argument about whether it was in fact contracting. It's a message board tic, is what I'm saying, not a real semantic concern.
To be fair, that first question about 'what is a systems programming language' is answered by Rob Pike then Andrei Alexandrescu as
Pike: When we first announced Go we called it a systems programming language, and I slightly regret that because a lot of people assumed that meant it was an operating systems writing language. And what we should have called it was a 'server writing language', which is what we really thought of it as. As I said in the talk before and the questions, it's turned out to be more generally useful than that. But know what I understand is that what we have is a cloud infrastructure language because what we used to call servers are now called cloud infrastructure. And so another definition of systems programming is stuff that runs in the cloud.
Alexandrescu: I'm really glad I let Rob speak right now because my first question was 'go introduces itself as a systems programming language' and then that disappeared from the website. What's the deal with that? So he was way ahead of me by preempting that possible question.
So it seems to me that they struggle with the nuances of the concept as much as the commenters here, particularly as it pertains to Golang.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227986
This perpetual debate reminds me of the trouble HN used to have with the concepts of "contractors" and "consultants", where any time someone mentioned that they were doing consulting work there'd be an argument about whether it was in fact contracting. It's a message board tic, is what I'm saying, not a real semantic concern.