> "because C is such a small and simple language (and one which, as you suggested, often feels like a bunch of syntactic sugar over PDP-7 assembly)."

I didn't describe such qualities of C in my previous post. At all.

And to be clear, I didn't mean "devs who learned how to program in the 1990s". I meant "devs who were active in the 1990s", which would have mostly been devs who came up in the 1970s and 1980s (where learning BASIC, then assembly was common).

I also made no claim about first languages in my previous statement. I only said there was a likely progression from assembly to C or C++ (for a C++ dev).

My point was, the talent pool in the 1990s would be able to handle the downsides of C++, and the upsides would have been a bonus. Whereas modern devs aren't used to the downsides, thus C++ is a step back for them.

What I should have added is that for devs in the 1990s, there would have been very few large legacy C++ codebases.