It sounds like a sensationalist rant, in my opinion, especially the part where he compares accidental software failure to life-or-death non-accidents (removing stop signs, locking doors). Does anyone know of any cases of death-by-buffer-overflow? Expecting someone to get the same punishment for a programming error that someone else gets for removing a stop sign is silly.<p>What's the difference between "real-time garbage collection" and ordinary garbage collection? Wikipedia says that Baker "has made contributions in garbage collection", but is it sufficient for him to state that he invented real-time garbage collection? Did Reddit <i>invent</i> a "better news aggregating site"?<p>The part where he's ranting about how terrible C is really irks me. While it's true that a <i>lot</i> of people have used C in situations where it was not the best option, it certainly has its uses, and to deny that C was a major step forward in programming is fallacy. Programming in assembler has all the shortcomings of C and none of the benefits, and there are always going to be certain software applications that need to be close to the hardware. Not to mention that if you've mathematically verified the correctness of your code, runtime bounds checking really is a waste of CPU cycles.<p>The article sounds more to me like someone who is bitter that he hasn't gotten more recognition for his contributions and is upset that what seems to him to be an inferior technology has more market share than the tech he has been involved in. Baker may be a great guy who has made important contributions to computer science, but that doesn't mean that resentment wasn't clouding his judgment in this instance.