Also regarding language design, C.Hoare on language safety, with am indirect jab to C, in his 1980's Turing Award speech.
"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."
=> I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson.
"This paper must clearly be read in the context of its date of composition (1973). The relative weight of comment on debugging and reasoning about programs clearly changed as a result of his own later research. Also, a richer notion of types would be appropriate today. But the sound advice in this paper transcends any minor aspects in which it might be considered to be out of date."
OO was already invented and Simula 67 is even referenced in the paper, but not yet recognized or understood in its significance; the claim about Algol 60 ("an improvement .. on nearly all its successors") is pretty bold.
And in what respect does this contradict my statement? The paper appeared in 1973.
(By the way: Simula 67 was mostly influenced by Simula I; both Simula versions are an extension of Algol 60; with some minor exceptions Algol 60 is a subset of Simula 67 - as later Stroustrup did it with C and C++).
"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."
=> I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson.