Thresholds of complexity are much, much lower than is usually believed. The original sin of C was to release an informal [under]specification. Kernighan and R

Thresholds of complexity are much, much lower than is usually believed. The original sin of C was to release an informal [under]specification. Kernighan and Ritchie failed, catastrophically, to foresee the phenomenon of management pressure to release/productionize software written by people who only half-knew the language. K&R C (or each of its de facto, platform-bound reference implementations) was at least simple enough to learn. None of its successors have been. Verifiable or maintainable software cannot be written in any language that is too complex to understand (or that is in any way underspecified). Verifiable or maintainable software cannot be written in any language that its developer has only half learned. And software that is not both verifiable and maintainable is worse than no software at all.