I grew up on BASIC and 6502. I did Pascal, C, Scheme, ML, etc. in college. I did C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, etc. in industry.

Every time I go to do anything remotely C based on my machines, I cannot fathom how (a) anything ever got done back before bytecode vm style languages (b) how anybody can condone having anything to do with C/++ today. Trying to build anything is a freaking nightmare of broken stupid badness.