@underlap language preferences once related strongly to runtime constraint. For example, back in the land of 8 bit computing and <64K ram, Pascal was perhaps king, and even C, once it was linked with a std library, often had far too much overhead. A 24K or larger "hello world" on perhaps a 48K machine was not all that practical ;). Understanding resource constraints is still important even if nobody counts their assembler opcodes or adds up machine cycles anymore.