The version of Pascal I learned on (early 1980s) had the problems Kernighan refers to in this piece: http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html http://www.

The version of Pascal I learned on (early 1980s) had the problems Kernighan refers to in this piece: http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html Most awfully, "length of the array is part of the type of the array". This made some programming rather painful (strings and numerical programming, for example). Maybe other dialects of that time didn't have this problem, I don't know. I do know I found C to be a great relief. Javascript is a good example of historical accident, on the other hand. It's got just enough extensibility that its flaws can be worked around. But its popularity is not due to its careful design.