wtfdeer

The "teaching language" adage is misleading. Pascal wasn't made to merely teach programming before moving on to "proper" languages, as this would imply. Instead, it was made to teach proper structured programming, a novel idea at the time.

And it was very practical, too. Apple's Lisa OS and the original Photoshop were written in Pascal. Windows and Classic Mac OS had official SDKs for Pascal. Delphi was very widely used for enterprise apps. Sure, it lost the competition against C in the early 90s, but it was easily in the top three - against literal thousands of dead languages.

Even now, some projects using Pascal are amazing. Take fpPS4 for example: a Wine-like PlayStation 4 runtime, reimplemented in Free Pascal. That's one of the most hardcore things I've seen, period. It proves that Pascal is a competent systems programming language, too.

As for "Apple Pascal", "Turbo Pascal" and the like not being "the" Pascal, well, duh: the original Pascal spec is what, two dozen pages long? Of course it had to be improved over time. We don't use K&R C either.

I won't be rallying anyone to restoring the language to its former glory, but let me say this: it was there for us, and it was great while it lasted.

Having tried to teach a few acquaintances some programming tidbits, I can tell you that they're already excluded. The local programming textbooks are made of cringe, the vocabulary is confusing and the documentation is scarce and out of date and often poorly translated.

The code itself is a mere curiosity, but it has two key takeaways.

First, writing code in national languages is mostly a shit idea. Here we can at least recognize and match some words, but what if it was Arabic or Chinese script? Even with source code, you just might've been better off with a disassembly.

Second, don't underestimate Pascal. For all its faults, the language is very readable, and its build and module systems are still more convenient than most of what we have today. I dearly miss the time when you could just download some code, hack on it, press Ctrl+F9 and see the result.