[p932]

Some bits of Fran Allen in Coders At Work book: http://www.codersatwork.com/fran-allen.html

"We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C came out, at one of the SIGPLAN compiler conferences, there was a debate between Steve Johnson from Bell Labs, who was supporting C, and one of our people, Bill Harrison, who was working on a project that I had at that time supporting automatic optimization. The nubbin of the debate was Steve’s defense of not having to build optimizers anymore because the programmer would take care of it. That it was really a programmer’s issue"

"We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are . . . basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities. "