Fun historical fact that the “x <- 5” assignment instead of “x = 5” comes from APL. Here’s more from Quora.
APL? Yep, I learned that language in a 5-week class at Purdue. Learned C that way, too. Fortran was two weeks at the end of a semester learning Pascal. All the other engineering disciplines ignored Pascal; they had classes only on Fortran.
So, how did that work out? Never used Pascal on the job, barely used C (but later that was useful as a precursor to Java), and used Fortran for an entire semester while on co-op. Of course, APL was cool and all that, and its curiosity value exceeded the purity value lead of Pascal.