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

Apparently, this is a game that two can play. Niklaus Wirth, the creator of Pascal, had this to say in turn:

"From the point of view of software engineering, the rapid spread of C represented a great leap backward. It revealed that the community at large had hardly grasped the true meaning of the term “high-level language” which became an ill-understood buzzword."

Source: Niklaus Wirth, A Brief History of Software Engineering, 2008 (https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Miscellaneous/IEEE-Annals.p...)

Not only Niklaus Wirth,

Here is C.A.R Hoare's on his "The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture", guess to what programming language he is indirectly making a point of, regarding 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson.

"A consequence of this principle is that 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."