Why Pascal is not my favorite programming language (1981) [pdf]

Except he missed the part where Modula-2 was made available in 1978, exactly to fix all the original issues with standard Pascal, everything that he complains about, minus type safety.

The thing we are still trying to add back into C, 50 years later.

And C++. While it does have slightly better types than C, I can still apply functions that the compiler doesn't even warn me about and that crash my program at runtime. If I'm lucky. When the phase of the Moon is adversarial, my program continues running in a corrupt state.

There is a good argument to be made, that this was purposefully missed or the blind spots were caused by being an employee of and tied to Bell Labs corporate interests, along with other critics of Pascal.

Many, who don't study or know of the history, can get sucked into the rhetoric of C as the "superior language" versus the reality of it being a heavily corporate pushed language. Pascal was in the way, so got hammered by bad press. Same sort of thing happens today, in these weird programming language scuffles. Rust, Zig, Vlang, Dlang, Odin, C3, etc... If a competitor is in the way, strange one-sided and highly critical blogs can materialize.

By 1987, pretty much any of Kernighan's criticisms involving Pascal and derivatives were moot. But he never retracted or modified what he got wrong or had changed. He had many years to do so. That was before the 2nd edition of his book (The C programming language in 1988). And before ANSI C (1989). Turbo Pascal and Object Pascal were out, which both took lessons from Modula-2, and were widely known successes.