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Comment by Torwald | Hacker News Reader

One of the factors was Microsoft. The rival Borland was big on Pascal with the venerable Turbo Pascal.

During the years where the mainstream office business landscape transitioned from DOS to OS/2, no wait, Windows, broadly speaking there where two types of application programmers. Those that used C or C++ and those that didn't.

For the later camp MS promoted various flavours of Basic, which also had to do with Office and scripting an Works for DOS etc. But I suspect it was also a "theological" battle against Borland.

On the other platforms Pascal was succesful, but the Amiga and the Atari tanked. The Macintosh escaped that destiny barely. Maybe Swift is the new Pascal?

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While you do have a point, Microsoft also sold a Pascal compiler for many years so it's not exactly like they were on a crusade against the language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Pascal

When they tried competing with Turbo Pascal, they initially didn't do it by trying to crush it with QuickBasic or QuickC but by introducing QuickPascal, which was source compatible with Turbo Pascal:

https://winworldpc.com/product/quickpascal/1x

Actually, the record shows that Microsoft did very much try to crush Borland. While Microsoft did initially offer QuickPascal and embraced it (had no choice because of Pascal's popularity), Borland crushed them with Turbo Pascal 5.5 (1989) that had their version of Apple's Object Pascal (created in 1986) extensions. From Turbo Pascal 5.5 and up, it was using Borland's version of Object Pascal.

Note, C++ took a bit to take off, so didn't start to go toe to toe with Pascal until around 1992. C++ didn't get ISO until 1998. C# didn't happen until 2000. So Borland and Pascal were a thorn to Microsoft for years, not to mention Java (1995) and Sun.

Borland was eventually forced to sue Microsoft for unfair competitive practices. Microsoft was arguably playing dirty, and hired away many of Borland's top engineers. This included the creator of Turbo Pascal, Anders Hejlsberg. Who then Microsoft had him create C#, along with other ex-Borland engineers. In addition, there was all kinds of allegations during the 90s about Microsoft blocking or hiding APIs from Borland and negatively affecting their software.

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