I've used a lot of languages both in hobby projects and professionally. I learned pascal in high school when I took the majority of what a lot of computer scien

I've used a lot of languages both in hobby projects and professionally. I learned pascal in high school when I took the majority of what a lot of computer science departments teach in their first/second year of college. This is after learning C in middle school (this was late 80's early 90's) under the direction of my math teacher who thought I should learn something besides BASIC/assembly. So, that said, looking back and trying to teach the current generation basic programming concepts beyond variables/loops/etc, aka data structures. I repeatedly think that my high school data structures/etc teachers did a far better job than the current crop trying to wedge more advanced computer science topics into languages like Java, python, C++ or even C. The replacements (Rust) are bad or worse for teaching these concepts because the language just simply gets in the way to much. C is maybe the best of the allowed choices because its possible to write say linked lists, or linked tree structures fairly easy but its got so many foot guns that Pascal manages to avoid. Languages like C++ might be reasonable, until some prof dictates that the class should be using std::unique_ptr() or whatever, which just adds confusion to something that should at its heart be fairly simple. So in the end, I think Niklaus Wirth actually has a bit of an masterpiece in Pascal when it comes to creating a language for teaching computer science topics. The fact that I also convinced the place I worked to use Delphi on a couple of greenfield projects in the mid 1990's and that was probably some of the most productive work I've ever done shows that pascal also works just fine in a commercial setting.