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At the time everyone was sure that Pascal was The Future of both OS and app development.

What happened instead was that everybody had their own Pascal dialect with the extensions it needed to be actually useful. Meanwhile, C had them all, already, and was about the same everywhere. Soon after, C++ came along, and there was again only one (although Microsoft delivered workable template support very late).

Lesson in Network Effect there. Also, shooting for usefulness out the gate.

Meanwhile, the Pascal crowd went off with Modula-2, Modula-3, Oberon, Apollo Pascal, UCSD Pascal, Object Pascal, Delphi, and countless others, none compelling. Apparently Delphi (still) has economic importance. The rest, not so much.




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