It's not hard to learn. It was often taught as a "first language" the place that I guess Python occupies today. Essentially a more sophisticated BASIC
Absolutely wrong.
PASCAL was invented by Professor Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich specifically for teaching structured programming, circa 1970 (year of first release). It's a descendant of ALGOL (1960), which was pretty much the first structured programming language and introduced functions that could be recursively invoked -- ALGOL is the ancestor of C and PL/I as well as Pascal and relatives (Modula-2, Oberon, etc) and is hugely important.
BASIC came out of Dartmouth College in the US in the mid-sixties and the emphasis was on interactive invocation: early BASIC was almost completely non-structured (GOTO for flow of control, minimal subroutines, IF statements with no ELSE).
While both Pascal and BASIC were intended as teaching languages, they took radically different views of what to teach. And Python is different again: Python has the virtue of a simple and consistent core syntax, but wasn't designed for teaching -- it was designed for scripting, and was developed in the early 1990s for computers with 2-3 orders of magnitude more resources than early BASIC and Pascal.
Object Pascal/Delphi (Delphi was Borland's proprietary implementation with RAD for Windows) is an outgrowth of Borland's Turbo Pascal from the early 1980s, which in turn took Wirth's Pascal and added some essentials that had been missing -- notably dynamically allocated strings, modules, and finally object encapsulation -- that made it much more suitable for writing serious code: for a while Turbo Pascal was a viable competitor for C on MS-DOS.
But Pascal is in no way related to BASIC.
I stand by exactly what I said.
In practice, it was taught as an introduction to programming.
For a decade or two, children learned Basic and highschool/JC aged kids learned Pascal.
Of course they aren't the same thing. It'd be like saying kids ride tricycles and then bicycles and clapping back about penny farthings, velocipedes and dandy horses while tricycles started as a wheelchair device.
Give me a break. The point was Pascal is accessible and easy to learn.
I've met both Kurtz and Wirth and I'm sure they wouldn't have a problem with this.
I think the post you are replying to got it exactly right. IMO your post got it all wrong.
>"I've met both Kurtz and Wirth and I'm sure they wouldn't have a problem with this."
Modern Delphi/FreePascal and the one created by Wirth are very different. I would not call it the same language. And what you "sure they wouldn't" is totally irrelevant.
The question was about that, specifically, not about the history, not about the nuanced details of who created it, but about how hard it was to pick up.
Specifically "Any recommendations on how to learn it"
It's not in the class of R, FORTH, assembly or Haskell. It's not like Erlang. It's as conceptually approachable as Basic and historically was taught after Basic to tens of millions of people over the course of two decades, in that order.
It is not.
>"assembly "
It has assembly built in.
I’d much rather be taught Pascal than Java. Probably 20 year old me would feel differently, but the 20 year old me was a much worse software engineer (actually, he was just a self taught programmer kid.)
After the rise of the web in the early 2000s it moved around a bit. Java, PHP, Ruby, Javascript, even Flash sometimes, but now it's generally Python and it's so far bucked the trend and managed to remain respectable. Pascal and BASIC had a grip on that slot probably since the late 1970s through maybe early 2000s. Before that it was Fortran.
I did y2k stuff 25 years ago, there's a lot of shit fortran out there.
Is there some hidden context to these comments, like "we've all just inhaled industrial solvent fumes and then posted on Hacker News?"