I, being one of the precise brats with trash-80s mentioned, bumped into it in 84-86 era. Fortran and pascal were, to me, options to basic and all three were somewhat ok, perfectly understandable and no use whatsoever since they were much to slow to do anything remotely cool on our tiny boxes. In high school four years down the line, I bumped into it again, trying to rewrite old fortran code in C and bumping into stuff written in pascal off and on, sometimes being pressured to write in Pascal. Again, we (true to our bratty nature) had no concept of what all the old timers were bickering about - unless you used C or assembler to get close to the metal, who cares? Write in Modula2, Perl, Basic, Lisp, ML, Smurf.. whatever. Once you're not using what the machine uses, pick your poison - it's of little concern to us, though sure, we'll write in it and read it it you'd like. Took another decade before I saw that there was some actual merit to debating what language to use since it influences the style quite a lot, but I still think it's perhaps given a little more credit than it is due.