> I'd rather blame the quality of learning resources or student lack of attention here than the language design if someone mistakes = for equality operator.

I see you don't have much experience with other programming languages, or you would have known that "=" is the equality operator in BASIC, Pascal, SQL and Excel... just to name a few of the most common occurrences where beginners -or- large-scale deployments would encounter this.

That is the entire point of this paper, it uses C as an example, but the concepts are the same.