My point was that I don't think Smalltalk was ever more popular in the industry than C regardless of the time frame. By the mid 90's lisp machines were pretty l

My point was that I don't think Smalltalk was ever more popular in the industry than C regardless of the time frame. By the mid 90's lisp machines were pretty long gone, betting on Lisp instead of C if employability is the metric seems rather bold. MIPS I concede, it was remained fairly popular for a long time. I guess my overall point is that the subjective choices made by this university back then don't really mean much by now. The fact that they taught Pascal instead of C alone proves that they weren't particularly prescient. >Regarding language comparisons, actually C++ is Italian and C Latin. I thought about that while writing this bad analogy but I couldn't come up with a better one. I wasn't really talking about the historical relationship between C and C++ but rather about their relative complexities. Learning C++ is vastly more complicated than learning C. On top of that the coding style of a modern C++ application (which generally involves a lot of metaprogramming, OOP and even some functional constructs) is fairly different from a standard C codebase. You don't write C like you write C++ and vice-versa. There's this good talk about how we should "stop teaching C" (if we want to teach C++): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk I think the opposite holds true as well for very much the same reasons.