In some alternate universe, the Forth/Forth++ programmers are sneering at the silly die-hard C programmers. :-)
Back in the time that most of the story takes place, there was not the glut of well-developed, thoroughly documented, cross-platorm tools with helpful user communities that we have today. Every machine had its own set of 2 or 3 first-class development development packages (i.e., pascal, cobol, basic, fortran: choose any two).
So when a small, elegant cross-platform development solution like Forth or C comes along, folks would get really excited about it. If you found something you could be productive with, and could take it from job to job, it was hard not to. It just didn't make sense to use the best tool for that particular machine when you knew there was a high probability that you might never use that vendor's hardware for any other project.