Francis wants to stop building insecure software. As a start, he is pledging not to use C/C++ for new projects. Choosing a different language for your work may not inevitably lead to safe code, but at least it’ll reduce the number of gratuitous buffer overflows we are geneating everywhere. And, well, you have to start somewhere.
[I’ve not signed, because I can imagine a few circumstances where I might want to write C/C++. But I’ll continue to avoid them wherever possible]