Too cool for school (or, history anyway)

There has been a flurry of articles and blog posts in reaction to Oracle's Jeet Kaul who, at EclipseCon 2010, said "We need to get the younger generation interested and excited [about Java] just like I was" and "I would like to see people with piercings doing Java programming".  There have been some exchanges over "cool" languages and whether "cool" is a good thing.  I contributed the following 2-cents on a JavaWorld discussion...

"Cool" led to most computer security problems in the world today

I have been around long enough to have seen several generations of "cool" languages overtaking established ones.  Unfortunately, the new language was sometimes a big step backward.

A case in point was when C swept the world, replacing the line of languages like Pascal and the stillborn Ada.  Because Unix was starting to get out of the lab and into microcomputers, C gained visibility.

BIG PROBLEM: Pascal (and others) could tell how big an array was, and hence could stop execution when someone attempted to write past the end.  C was unable to do this (and because of the language design there was no way to "fix it" in the compiler).  This is the security hole that is at the root of all computer virus exploits.

If developers chose new languages (or systems) based on technical merit rather than "cool", we would be decades ahead of where we are today.

As a side note/rant: I have always thought that "cool" was effected by political zeitgeist.  It seems more than coincidence that European/Govt-regulated/strong-typing languages (e.g. Pascal/Ada) were replaced by get-the-compiler-regulation-off-the-programmers-back ethic of C at the same time Ronald Reagan was selling everyone on the same notion about government.  Let the programmer do dangerous things (like convert an array into a pointer) because he knows better...(sounds like let the bankers do whatever they want because they know better than the regulators who after all only learn from past mistakes...wimps!)