[gshubert17]

I've taught beginning programming courses at the college level to adults for more than 20 years. In the early 1990s we used Pascal, specifically Turbo Pascal for Microsoft DOS and Windows. It worked very well for me as a language and environment for learning to program. After two courses in Pascal, students went on to C, C++, and Java.

My university has since changed the curriculum so that the first language of instruction is C++, leaving out objects and classes until after the first three courses. I experience and share the frustrations of beginning students wrestling with the minutiae of C++ coding, which leaves less time for seeing the "big picture" of programming. These struggles drain a lot of the energy which can be generated by making progress learning to program.

Some of the rationale for dropping Pascal, I think, was that "nobody" in the real world used it. This was untrue, of course, but the Pascal community didn't have the self-promotion and media buzz that Java did.

I find it curious that two languages deliberately designed for ease of instruction -- Pascal and Scheme -- should have such a bad reputation in some quarters.