The following is an excerpt from the book "Object Success" by Bertrand Meyer. --- PRUDENT HIRING PRINCIPLE: Beware of C hackers. A "C hacker" is someone who has had too much practice writing low-level C software and making use of all the special techniques and tricks permitted by that language. Why single out C? First, interestingly enough, one seldom hears about Pascal hackers, Ada hackers or Modula hackers. C, which since the late nineteen-seventies has spread rapidly throughought the computing community, especially in the USA, typifies a theology of computing whenre the Computer is the central deity and its altar reads Efficiency. Everything is sacrificed to low-level performance, and programs are built in terms of addresses, words, memory cells, pointers, manual memory allocation and deallocation, unsafe type conversions, signals and similar machine-oriented constructs. In this almost monotheist cult, where the Microsecond and the Kilobyte complete the trinity, there is little room for such idols of software engineering as Readability, Provability and Extendibility. Not surprisingly, former believers need a serious debriefing before they can rejoin the rest of the computing community and its progress towards more modern forms of software development. The above principle does not say "Stay away from C hackers", which would show lack of faith in the human aptitude to betterment. There have indeed been cases of former C hackers who became born-again O-O developers. But in general you should be cautious about including C hackers in your projects, as they are often the ones who have the most trouble adapting to the abstraction-based form of software development that object technology embodies.