Much of that (potential) compilation speed is due to Wirth's personality, but his circumstances also helped.

For industrial languages, programs will be compiled a few times while developing and debugging, and then run many, many more times in production.

For a teaching language, programs will be compiled more than a few times while learning and debugging, and then run never.

This situation has the corollary that teaching languages ought almost always to opt in favour of compilation speed over speed of compiled code.

(when I started programming, developers shared a minicomputer CPU, which meant that even with Unix, which prioritises editor threads over compiler threads, ends of quarters were brutal for load average and hence system responsiveness)