On 02/05/2017 19:11, Steve Johnson wrote:

I recall a paper Dennis wrote (maybe more like a note) that was titled
     echo -c considered harmful
(I think it was -c).   It decried the tendency, now completely out of
control, for everybody and their dog to piddle on perfectly good code
just because it's "open".

There's definitely Rob Pike's talk "UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered Harmful", which he delivered at the 1983 Usenix Association Conference and Software Tools USers Group Summer Conference.  Unfortunately, I can't find it online.  It's interesting that the talk's date is now closer to the birth of Unix than to the present.