if you were serious about coding, you knew C. I think this is fundamentally the same toxic thinking that is still with us today. C offered no actual advantage

if you were serious about coding, you knew C. I think this is fundamentally the same toxic thinking that is still with us today. C offered no actual advantages over Turbo Pascal for DOS/Windows programming. I'm sure one can come up with platforms or releases that weren't supported by TP, since C was the defacto standard. Regardless, they're fundamentally equivalent. Meanwhile, Turbo Pascal was blazingly fast compared to C. The C linker in particular used to take forever. Turbo Pascal was seen as a toy language. My AP Computer Science exam results were disregarded by colleges because it was in Pascal. A few years later, I was a C++ snob and looked down on Visual Basic "macro hackers". Meanwhile, at least one true genius electrical engineer I worked with would rapidly prototype software in VB that would take me weeks to replicate in C++. There's a weird disdain in software development for approachable, efficient tools that create actual business value.