[VLM]

The perspective I had, having lived thru it, is once the professional / teaching separation happened, pascal was automatically doomed. There is a tension in american culture of educational vs vocational, and the vocational crowd disposed of pascal in a few short years. Very politically incorrect for adherents of that group to teach anything that isn't directly mentioned by name in job requirements or ivy league applications, and the educators realized you can teach "big O" and "quicksort" and "what is a finite automata" in any language, so they had no long term allegiance. So bye bye pascal.

(Another interesting analogy to Pascal is cursive handwriting... ever educator, ever, always claimed we'd be required to use it elsewhere although they personally find it a complete waste of time, typical emperor has no clothes or blind conformity to a dead belief system. My own kids are not being taught cursive in school, so progress is possible)

Nothing in IT is ever new, fundamentally the JVM concept is just a re-implementation of the "famous at that time" pascal p-code system. Compile pascal to p-code once, run that p-code on any system. And from memory, just like java, you end up needing customized sources for specific machines and specific versions of the p-code interpreter which eliminated that marketing bullet point in actual practice.

[kbenson]

My twelve year old learned cursive, but I think they spent comparatively little time on it compared to what I spent. She's never had to write a paper in it. My nine year old hasn't learned it, at least not yet. They both have markedly better (regular) handwriting than me, mine has deteriorated over the years.