I loved writing Pascal and Modula-2 at the time, and using both for a while sure made me a better programmer. Pascal was an excellent educational tool, but for a decade had enormous business impact, too.

Most criticized things regarding Pascal e.g. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pas... were already fixed by extension or coukd be fixed easily.

Its slight verbosity - somewhere between C and COBOL - arguably was a pro rather than a con.

Today, Ada and Julia seem to be the langages alive that resemble Pascal the most.