[analog31]

Oddly enough, I bet the farm on Pascal. I learned Pascal in high school after taking a course in BASIC, and I read about C -- maybe in Byte Magazine. To me, Pascal seemed much more elegant and readable, and pointer arithmetic seemed like a bug factory. I was supremely confident, like any teenager, that I knew my ** and that Pascal would win out over C.

[mdip]

LOL, though I didn't take a course in BASIC (AP CS was taught in Pascal), I swore up and down as a teenager that Pascal "would win" and put off learning C/C++ as a result.

It didn't hurt me much since I started writing software, professionally, in C#, which I'd started writing code in shortly after it was released. I'd even offer that my background in Pascal was relatively easily translated into C# once you get past the minor syntactical differences[0].

I think discovering how wrong I had been about Pascal's future is one of the reasons I don't fanboy programming languages. Don't get me wrong, I favor C#/TypeScript over nearly everything, but I recognize that's because those are the languages I understand the most, I understand their use cases and where there are better choices, but the best choice -- for me -- is the one(s) I know and there's plenty of jobs writing code in those languages.

[0] Keywords, braces were fine; I can't think of a difference that fundamentally bothered me other than `=`/`==` and `:=`/`=`. I'd often muscle-memory the `:=`. I can still hit all three required keys in almost one swipe.