Developers make contradictory productivity claims all the time. You see it with LLMs, strongly vs weakly typed languages, GC vs non-GC, React Native vs Kotin /

Developers make contradictory productivity claims all the time. You see it with LLMs, strongly vs weakly typed languages, GC vs non-GC, React Native vs Kotin / Swift, JIT languages vs AOT languages, and so on and so forth. Back in the 80s and 90s the bigger concern was portability and cost of the compiler license, both of which C did better. C was closer to the metal than vanilla Pascal too. But commercial Pascal dialects supported pointers, inlined assembly, and everything else you needed to write low-level systems code. Which again comes back to C offering better portability and cheaper licenses.