Modern Truths that Might Hurt

The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.

C --"the infantile disorder"--, by now nearly 45 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

C --"the fatal disease"-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to C: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

The use of C cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.

JavaScript is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

>>4
Every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to - they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law.
- C. A. R. Hoare

Was he a smug lisp weenie?