> You might expect John Carmack to be pretty old school and dogmatic on using e.g. C and instead it seems he has a very broad taste and experience with different languages and tools.

He has been using various programming languages for a long time. Basic, assembly, (turbo) pascal, etc. In my experience most old school dogmatic C programmers started with C and never even tried to use any other programming language halfway seriously.

He especially gives a lot of praise to Borland for making turbo pascal and how far ahead it was of its competition back in the day when it comes to developer tooling (IDE, debugger, etc)