as someone who started out with turbo pascal I totally agree with this but I have to add an extra point that turbo pascal is an IDE you press F9 (I think?) and

as someone who started out with turbo pascal I totally agree with this but I have to add an extra point that turbo pascal is an IDE you press F9 (I think?) and it runs your freaking code, press F8 (I think?) and you have a line-stepping debugger I started learning programming in 2003 in turbo pascal, already very outdated at the time. But it is still probably the most pragmatic choice for teaching pointer-based programming (it should be a crime to teach data structures in a language that doesn't have manual memory management)