When was this? If this was before virtualisation was common I can maybe understand that but any time in the last 20 years is pretty dumb and the last 10 so braindead I question if they would've been able to judge things properly
Executing the code in your head removed from the nuances of hardware, CPU architecture and compiler versions seems like a virtuous pursuit (?)
…and that’s how we got Java :p
And stuff like Pascal, too, so it’s not all bad.