Okay, this makes me rethink my previous statement. There are two kinds of trust here: A low level programming language should not impose restrictions on the code that prevent the programmer from doing what needs to be done, even if it looks wrong. This is how I read the 'Spirit of C" that you quoted. And certain applications would be impossible to write without it. But you need a development process to make sure that your system does exactly the right thing. So the quote should read "trust the process" rather than "trust the programmer".