I really wonder how Pascal and the Pascal family of languages, including modula/oberon and ada, how they became niche and how java and c++ took over the world?
Long answer,
UNIX spread like fire, because Bell Labs/AT&T initially weren't allowed to sell it.
So the code was given to university, and while they needed to pay for a UNIX license to use it, the price was symbolic versus paying for something like VMS.
Which naturally made UNIX the number one choice for the startups trying to get into the Workstation market during the 90's.
So C started to spread into the 8 and 16 bit computers in some form.
When those 8 and 16 bit home computers, written in Assembly, started to be replaced by more powerful systems, the OS vendors were adopting C as the language.
Most won't be aware of this today, but Microsoft did sell Xenix and MS-DOS at the same time, they sold Xenix as they decided to focus on MS-DOS instead. In fact, MS-DOS 4 failure was an attempt to make it more UNIX like.
At the same time, maybe to reduce costs, the OS vendors started to reduce the amount of compilers they were selling it for their platforms, selling only the same ones as they were using themselves for the OS, which by then naturally meant C.
Any other language started to be available only from third parties, and most of the time without bindings to all OS APIs.
So given the choice of buying the language programming tools from the OS vendor, with everything ready to code, or paying even more (you would need the OS SDK anyway) and having to code bindings, the majority stayed with OS SDK only.
As C++ is a C sibling, coming from UNIX birthplace, it quickly found a place among C compiler vendors tooling.
Java, well it was pushing by Sun, quickly adopted by Microsoft, IBM and Oracle on their platforms.
So enjoyed a bit that extra love from platform owners.
Having lived through this evolution, I have learned only to bet on platform languages, or those that eventually get blessed by platform owners on their official SDKs.
On Unix mass adoption...
My best friend (and still best friend to this day) in the early 90s had an SGI Indy at home (his stepfather happened to be the director of SGI Benelux) and so I got to play with one of the earliest SGI Indy. What a machine to have, for teenagers into computing, at home in the early nineties!
The shock, the world of difference between a beige box running MS-DOS / Windows 3.1 and stuff like (Turbo) Pascal compared to that amazing SGI workstation...
I saw the future, I saw "my" future when I got to play on that SGI Indy. And then when I discovered Linux (back when it was shipping on a CD attacked to a book/magazine) I got to transform my MS/Windows beige PC into a (modest) Un*x station and never looked back (I'm using Linux daily since that day).
I don't have bad memories of programming in Pascal but both Pascal and Delphi felt, to me, like deeply attached to the MS ecosystem and a bit toy'ish (making it easy to do easy things, but very hard to make anything a bit advanced).
As soon as I found a way out of the MS world I was out and so I was done with Pascal/Delphi.
Hardly impressive, with its green phosphor terminal.
SGI was interesting, then again I guess you didn't had much contact with Atari and Amiga scene back then, right?
Object Pascal dialect was originally created by Apple in collaboration with Niklaus Wirth (see clascal), used to write the Lisa and Mac OS operating systems (naturally they also had their share of Assembly, like UNIX also does).
They only switched to C and C++ after market pressure to have some compatibility with them.
Oh how I missed Turbo for Linux...
Interesting paying for cygnus stuff on Windows never occurred to me, I rather spent my money with Borland and Microsoft compilers.
When I got into university, I had my first set of Pascal classes on UNIX.
Coming from a background of multiple Turbo Pascal versions, I was on TPW for Windows 3.x by then, I was dismayed having to do university assignments in P2C, using original ISO Pascal (it wasn't even capable of the ISO Extended version).
So no wonder that Pascal on UNIX hardly got any love.
I think only HP-UX and VMS Pascal variants were actually relatively good.
All the ones I currently use in some form, Java, .NET languages, C++, JS, SQL, fulfill the above via ISO, ECMA, or official reference docs managed by multiple vendors.
And to be honest, even those that don't I really don't care any longer, because most of the code I write isn't mine to own rather the employer, so as long as it fulfil what the customer is after, I am good, when the project is done I move to the next challenge.
If project requires cross platform capabilities, then usually something along the lines of what is available across all platform SDKs gets chosen.
I remember that Janus Ada for DOS cost thousands for a license. Java and GNU C++ were free.
Now Microsoft has the Community edition of Visual Studio for free C#, Visual BASIC.Net, C++ and other languages.
Today when I program in C (thanks to embedded work), it seems like many of the modern improvements to the language consist of making it more Pascal-like.
If you wanted to play in those ecosystems, you had to learn C at the beginning. People wanted to play in those ecosystems. :)
It’s not a meritocracy driven development, it’s marketing 101.
Go is to Google what Java is to Sun/Oracle. History is repeating but we can’t really fight it because it would be a wasted effort.