By the time I was ready to learn the next thing after BASIC and assembler as a teenager in the mid-90s, the "Pascal is dead" meme had already spread enough (at least here in the US) that I never even realized that Pascal had advantages over C. And then I fell for the "safe languages can't be compiled" myth propagated by Java and the popular dynamic languages (Perl, Python, etc.).
Maybe it's time for a Pascal resurgence. Pascal is only dead if we treat it as such. And I see there's at least one active open-source Pascal compiler (Free Pascal).
Pascal was quite strong in Europe up to when the web started taking off around early 2000.
Here Pascal was actually Turbo Pascal/Delphi, as other dialects were usually ignored.
> And then I fell for the "safe languages can't be compiled" myth propagated by Java and the popular dynamic languages (Perl, Python, etc.).
This is why I sometimes tend to defend Go, even when I used to bash here some of its design decisions. Or keep bringing up Pascal family of languages or alternative commercial AOT compilers for .NET/JVM.
It is a mean for young generations to learn you don't need VMs for memory safe languages.
Maybe it's time for a Pascal resurgence. Pascal is only dead if we treat it as such. And I see there's at least one active open-source Pascal compiler (Free Pascal).