The Lair of the Pythia

When I was first starting out as a programmer I used to make a point of always reading Jerry Pournelle’s column in Byte magazine. Byte has long since bitten the dust, but the Chaos Manor column lives on. I’ve only caught up with it again recently, so I’ve no idea what Jerry has been talking about over the last few years, but in his current mailbag posting he has one of those letters from C programmers: “I would still choose C over Pascal any day of the week.” There’s no elaboration on that, but I’m guessing it would follow the standard pattern of complaining that Pascal doesn’t include a whole host of “essential” features that are not in the Pascal compiler you might see in a college programming course but are included in Delphi. Anyway, Jerry takes the bait, and launches into a resounding defense of Pascal and the philosophy of safe programming in general. You can read it all here (scroll to the bottom).