Wirth himself moving on to Oberon suggests that while Modula/Modula-2 were not quite there yet Well...that depends on your perspective, and Wirth had a particu

Wirth himself moving on to Oberon suggests that while Modula/Modula-2 were not quite there yet Well...that depends on your perspective, and Wirth had a particular one. Wirth was an academic, and mostly confined his real interests to academic topics rather than 'real world' programming concerns (not to say he was unaware of them). In particular, his interest in compilers resulted in languages that are generally straightforward to write decent compilers for, rather than appeal to every programmer PLT wishlist. That gets you things like "I/O is an exercise left to the student". So, yes, Wirth moved on from languages when he felt there was something more interesting to explore. Oberon has been described as an exercise in how much syntax can be take out of a programming language, for example (at risk of dramatic over-simplification), because that sort of minimalism became a research interest to Wirth. On the other hand, I personally think the existence of so many useful variant/extended Pascals and Modulas (and decedents like Ada & VHDL) means that lots of people thought they were good 'bones' that just needed to be fleshed out to move from academic to commercial use. That's not uncommon from stuff that starts out in universities. YMMV.