Being a Turbo Pascal expert by the time I got to learn C (early 90's), I never liked the language.
Turbo Pascal already offered me stronger type safety, real modules, OO, system programming capabilities. So C was meh, it only had better portability[0] going for it.
This lead me to follow Wirth's work and I became a scholar of Wirth's advocacy for safe systems programming.
I was also lucky to have access to Oberon and discover that implementing OS in GC enabled systems programming languages was feasible.
[0] whoever wrote K&R and early ANSI C code across commercial UNIX systems, knows how much "portable" C was really back then.
I first learned Pascal around 1978, tried Microsoft's QuickPascal around 1990, then used Turbo Pascal for work on a planetary science simulator [0] and teaching. From 1995 on I used its successor, Object Pascal and Delphi, which I thought was a really powerful combination of a good language, libraries/frameworks, and IDE. Mostly for the PC, Borland tried briefly to market to Unix systems with Kylix, but it didn't gain as much traction as they would've liked, I guess. Anders Hjelsberg [1] was inspired by Wirth's Tiny Pascal in his Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs book to work on Pascal. I think his efforts on Turbo Pascal, and Object Pascal were truly inspired.
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.
Turbo Pascal already offered me stronger type safety, real modules, OO, system programming capabilities. So C was meh, it only had better portability[0] going for it.
This lead me to follow Wirth's work and I became a scholar of Wirth's advocacy for safe systems programming.
I was also lucky to have access to Oberon and discover that implementing OS in GC enabled systems programming languages was feasible.
[0] whoever wrote K&R and early ANSI C code across commercial UNIX systems, knows how much "portable" C was really back then.