[wduquette]

My second language (after BASIC) was UCSD Pascal on a small PDP-11 my dad built from a kit; I was 14 or 15, and I loved it. Then came Apple Pascal (a UCSD variant); and then I got a CP/M-80 machine, a Kaypro-4, and discovered the first version of Turbo Pascal. Compilers were expensive in those days, hundreds of dollars; Turbo Pascal 1.0 was $50. I ordered a copy just a few minutes after I learned that it existed.

Pascal was a great language; but it lacked a standard way to define separate modules and reusable libraries. (UCSD Pascal had a way to define them; all Turbo Pascal had for the first several versions was a way to include other source files into the module being compiled.)

And then Unix happened. Every Unix system had a C compiler; and C ate Pascal's lunch. C was the cross-platform language of its day, more so than any other language that was available. And, from my point of view at the time, that's what killed Pascal.

[pjmlp]

More than that, what killed Pascal on the PC was Borland leaving the small devs market.

What ate Delphi's lunch, besides Borland's mismanagement going enterprise prices, was Java and .NET.

And even so, there is enough user base to keep an anual conference in Germany, and regular articles on development magazines like .NET and Ct.

[wduquette]

Borland did a lot of thrashing around that point. They were a great language company, but they wanted to be Microsoft. At one point they had their own spreadsheet (which was pretty good, but DOS only) and their own database manager. And some of their language products were weird (Turbo Prolog, which, so Prolog people tell me, wasn't quite Prolog).

[pjmlp]

I see the same pattern in JetBrains now, with Kotlin being their Delphi, trying to put it everywhere, instead of building on the strenghts of JVM/ART.

Everyone had their Lotus competion product on those days, Excel still wasn't the winner.

When Turbo Prolog came to be, every Prolog was a bit different. Even a decade later trying to write portable Prolog code between SWI and SICStus wasn't properly easy.

[fuzztester]

>More than that, what killed Pascal on the PC was Borland leaving the small devs market.

Correct. My memory is vague on this, plus I don't know a lot about it, but I think people were even creating commercial shrink-wrapped software in Turbo Pascal, in its heyday. And of course in Delphi too, later.