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Although it's meant to be sarcastic, I believe it nicely exposes typical things developers used to argue about back then, not that different from modern arguments about JS vs compiled-to-js, elixir vs erlang, GC vs manual memory management, etc.

Anybody knows some more serious piece from those times that would show the actual arguments of, say, PASCAL opponents?

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I'll give you an argument, PASCAL was ... ... ... ... ... slow

Academics were big kahunas with unrestricted accounts on mainframes, everyone else got tiny tiny slices of time. How tiny? A trash 80 gave you more processing power than an student account on the VAX.

Academics thought PASCAL was the bees knees. Everyone else could see it was unusable for practical work.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pasc...

By Brian Kernighan

This was written in 1981, so a lot changed after he wrote this.

He describes an old pascal dialect http://wiki.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Favorite_Pro...

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