The "hate" for Pascal (or at least weirdness towards it) was arguably generated by AT&T, and to a lesser extent by Microsoft. The Pascal programming language (t

The "hate" for Pascal (or at least weirdness towards it) was arguably generated by AT&T, and to a lesser extent by Microsoft. The Pascal programming language (to include Turbo Pascal, Delphi, and the IDE from Borland) were in the way and in competition to the languages that AT&T (C and C++) and Microsoft (BASIC and later C#) were attempting to push on the masses. Thus it became a thing to bash it. A lot of this was done by "hit pieces" written about Pascal and then often unthinkingly regurgitated in the media, books, and various blogs. Probably the most well known, that many programmers would know off the top of their heads, is "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", written in 1981 by Brian Kernighan. There were many more similar short "hit jobs" written like it. What is overlooked by many people is that Brian Kernighan worked for AT&T/Bell Labs (and didn't retire until around 2000). He was an advocate for C and friends of Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, co-creators of the C language. Sorry to digress a bit, but Ken Thompson would later on co-create Golang (Go), which many argue shows a strong Pascal influence. Brian Kernighan's assessment of Pascal was very bias, and should have been taken as such. Instead, it was "weaponized" as a way to disparage and discourage use of Pascal, even 20 to 40 years later. Even though: 1) Many of the negatives stated in his papers became no longer true as Pascal evolved as a programming language (to include Object Pascal/Delphi descendants). 2) What he stated were negatives were not true for various versions of Pascal around even the time of his paper being published. 3) Some of the things he described as "negatives" at the time, turned out to actually be positives about the language. Probably a good idea to take a look at the below link to get a better idea of various points: https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Favorite_Programming_Language https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Fav... Microsoft was the other major player involved, because it could be described that it went to war with Borland (including using dirty tactics), in order to squash it. Particularly Turbo Pascal, various products of Borland, and trying to derail the company. This includes hiring away Borland's top engineers to work for Microsoft, and among their biggest pilfered treasures was Anders Hejlsberg (the creator of C# and Turbo Pascal). Even today, in various C family language circles, there is unfounded and unthinking dislike for Pascal/Object Pascal/Delphi or anything not using curly braces. Despite that the language is a very good and viable alternative to C, C++, Java, or C#.