More relevant to the thread at hand: Martin Odersky wrote Turbo Modula-2.
https://www.artima.com/articles/the-origins-of-scala
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704733
(as with C# vs Scala, Hejlsberg's Turbo Pascal was faster and more popular than Odersky's Turbo Modula-2)