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Much as I also have never understood universities teaching to "teaching" architectures (DLX), or "teaching" languages (Eiffel - luckily removed from our curriculum before I started), at the same time I did not land a job based on having learned "practical" architectures 68k or MIPS either.

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A lot of my compsci education was in Pascal, which was not exactly a real-world language (though I guess Delphi had a dedicated niche for many years)

I actually think this was probably better than learning with real-world languages?

I believe it taught me to be a computer programmer. Not a Java guy or a C guy or a whatever guy. I think that was super valuable.

For assembly language we learned VAX assembly, which was already hilariously outdated, but again very valuable. It had a very beginner friendly instruction set, much more friendly than x86 which would have been the other realistic choice at the time.

In the 1970's and '80's, Pascal actually was commonly used for real work.

Hey I learned Eiffel. It's a nice language. I wish we had pre-conditions and post-conditions in modern procedural language.

We do - Ada!

I should definitely look more into Ada.

Assertions in e.g. python? Missing the 'contract view', but you could generate docs that pull in any assertions on input args or return value to do something like that.

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