Pascal killed my interest in programming for a while as it was force fed in both high school and earlier collage years. Reflecting back, it was the pessimistic approach to teaching of just pushing math problems via programming.
Ca. 1994 we had Pascal as the language for AP computer science. Later, they started adding other languages. In my school the options were Basic (TrueBasic) which was offered as a stepping stone to APCS and pascal. I also had the opportunity to study Scheme through CTY's excellent summer class.
At the time, I remember pascal feeling like "real programming". The programs were compiled and they operated at various levels of abstraction, from pointers up through advanced data structures and interfaces/ADTs. I didn't see Scheme as more than a toy, which was partly because the MIT Scheme implementation was just an interpreter. And I hated Basic and still do.
Pascal was great because it was pretty easy to learn and somewhat consistent. Its most annoying feature, semicolon-as-separator, was easily handled by the terrific Think pascal editor.
In its time, Pascal was a great choice. There were real-world things that you could do immediately using Think Pascal and Turbo Pascal. Making the switch to C and Unix wasn't simple but probably easier than starting with Basic. However, I was left with a bias towards wordy languages like Pascal, Ada and Modula-3 that took a while to get over :)
Free Pascal was originally derived from Object Pascal and later Delphi, both of which added more object oriented programming features to Pascal. Additionally, it supports some of the more advanced features introduced to Pascal with later releases of Delphi including managed types, interface types, operator overloading, generics, implicit and explicit conversions, extension properties and methods, as well and user defined initializers and finalizers for your custom types, and more.
I could write an article about each of these features, but in summary they each are powerful and help users write more useful programming code when leveraged correctly.
I also had mandatory pascal during my high school years. Although I knew a little of C, C++ and python at that time and felt a bit obscured about learning pascal, today, I deeply admire my teacher's choice of pascal. Pascal has a nice beginner terminal IDE with a debugger and breakpoints; it has types, stack allocation and memory planning before the program is being run; recursion is possible, and it does not have many obscure features like pointers and OOP obscurities. Today, perhaps I would suggest Julia as the first language to teach, but pascal is still at the top.
Luckily for me I've never received any formal training in programming back in school. My introduction to programming happened in University and research labs in a very simple way - I needed to process and interpret some experimental data live and the only way I could do it was a computer. So I got me a user guide for particular one and bunch of books. In a few days I was already coding away. In exactly the same way I was introduced to electronics. Had to make some equipment for my research as you could not by one. Started with machine codes but over the time I've used many languages including Pascal from Borland. Programming was far from my main job but at some point I switched from science to creating commercial products as I was good at it. Some products I own and some I develop for clients. Most of products are ether pure software or contain some good chunk of it so I am still happily coding away even though I am 60 already.
Pascal is great as a teaching language because of its simple syntax. It is also a pre-OO language, so you don't need to spend time explaining what classes and objects are. For an introductory programming course it is a very good language.
This was all people knew. Most people saw programming as a branch of math. When a high school offered a programming class, it was often taught by a math teacher. The smaller colleges in my state, that were beginning to add computer science, did so by combining it with the math department.
My mom taught programming in the early 80s. She took a course at the nearby community college, and a year later, was teaching the course. Her background was... high school math teacher. She said: "Programming is just math, a program is like a proof." Fortunately I loved math and proofs, so that way of thinking wasn't an obstacle for me. Clearly we know differently now.
they could approach the same math from the other side, by starting to write games. and gradually come to game math. that would be more interesting, and then it would become obvious why one may need some math while programming.
Back Then. When was that? At University (1978) we used Pascal as the first language to learn (if you exclude CDC Cyber 6600 assembly). Yes we did the Discrete math problems common in CS (https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Floyd-WarshallAlgorithm.html). We did other things as well. The professors were a mix of hippies, math geeks, and the Doctors from Doctor Who. Most knew both the academic and fun side of programming.
I guess it depends on the school and people there to create a fun but educational culture.
Heh, now you've made me consider an "abstract algebra for kids" tutorial, with data representations for simple games as the overarching conceit. Unfortunately, as a cishumanist, my finite lifetime expectation means I'll leave this project for some other interested party?
