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Pascal is a complete nightmare to start people off with if they are going to move on to a language like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, C# or Java.

It's superficially similar but it has all kinds of archaic quirks and lacks basic affordances like return values or short-circuiting (i.e. in order to evaluate `a AND b` Pascal evaluates both).

You might as well argue that beginners should start with Assembly. If you want to be unnecessarily cruel at least teach them something useful like C/C++.




I agree! Moreover, why not let beginners start with a language they could actually use in real life?




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