Perhaps it was Fran Allen.  In <i>Coders at Work</i>, she has quite a few things to say on the topic:<p>--- Begin Quote ---<p>-Seibel-: When do you think was the last time that you programmed?<p>-Allen-: Oh, it was quite a while ago. I kind of stopped when C came out. That was a big blow. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C came out, at one of the SIGPLAN compiler conferences, there was a debate between Steve Johnson from Bell Labs, who was supporting C, and one of our people, Bill Harrison, who was working on a project that I had at that time supporting automatic optimization.<p>The nubbin of the debate was Steve&#x27;s defense of not having to build optimizers anymore because the programmer would take care of it. That it was really a programmer&#x27;s issue. The motivation for the design of C was three problems they couldn&#x27;t solve in the high-level languages: One of them was interrupt handling. Another was scheduling resources, taking over the machine and scheduling a process that was in the queue. And a third one was allocating memory. And you couldn&#x27;t do that from a high-level language. So that was the excuse for C.<p>-Seibel-: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels?<p>-Allen-: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. And, in fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are key problems to solve.<p>By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are... basically not taught much anymore in colleges and universities.<p>--- End Quote ---<p>(taken from pp. 501-502)