OOP wasn't really yet a thing and GUIs (which I think of as the killer app for OO) were still experimental when I was first learning programming. I started out

OOP wasn't really yet a thing and GUIs (which I think of as the killer app for OO) were still experimental when I was first learning programming. I started out with Fortran and Pascal on a timeshared mainframe. Probably because of this background, I still find OO languages ungainly, especially the huge libraries that are usually associated. I'm also a bit of a skeptic about the purported value of the OO abstraction, which always seems to cherry-pick from a few problem classes that lend themselves to representation as interacting objects. While I sometimes teach programming in C# and C++, my main responsibility is our Algorithms and Data Structures courses, for which we've kept using plain old C. From a teaching perspective, it's a great language for teaching fundamental algorithms and data structures. The students are also able to leverage that work into later courses on microcontrollers and embedded systems. For my own work, I tend to mostly be writing code for somewhat idiosyncratic one-off data processing (I'm currently working on a genetic algorithm for class, student and professor scheduling) or embedded systems. The former I generally work in Common Lisp (SBCL)(although I do keep promising myself to learn enough Clojure to see if I prefer it). This is probably because of the way I think, as I tend to be comfortable building a system from bottom up, moving the data representation from the general facts I start with toward a representation that meets my needs. I actually came to CL pretty late, about a dozen years ago, but it really seems to suit me, possibly because I'm still primarily a command-line person. Being an emacs user certainly was a strong influence, too, although I don't hack elisp very much. I should add that I do often use CLOS, especially when working with more structured data, so I do use some OO, although it's mostly just to provide a more convenient interface to some complicated data type. For embedded development, I still work almost exclusively in assembler or C, with less assembler every year. I tend to be working on pretty low-powered special-purpose devices, so code reuse and robust interfaces don't add much value, but close control of exactly what the hardware is doing does. This was normal in that domain until comparitively recently, but the power of even cheap devices and the availability of libraries mean that there are a lot more options. I expect that I'll continue to work mostly in C out of familiarity and inertia, but I will admit to having recently bought some Lua books with the intent of trying it with ESP8266.