I remember being in my early 20s, learning C and Pascal, and having this one kid telling me I was learning dead languages and he’d earn 3 times more than me leaning 4GL as well as himself being 3 times smarter than everyone else too.

The only reason I remember this encounter so clearly was because he got rather annoyed, to the point of being aggressive, when I pointed out that most of the computing landscape was built on C and this wasn’t going to change any time soon.

Multiple decades later, and C-derived languages still rule the world. I do sometimes wonder if his opinion mellowed with time.