I also disagree with your assessment. Pascal has greater readability in comparison to C, so it's "weirdness" is in the sense that it's more verbose. Arguably, the inherent problem of C family languages is their terseness tends to make them more cryptic and symbolic. But because of their popularity, many have become used to the eccentricities.
Often those who learned C family languages first (C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript...), can feel there is "something wrong" when viewing the syntax and structures of other languages. When everybody only wears dark blue or black, somebody wearing purple or beige could be considered "weird".
The creator of Ruby, Matsumoto, was a C++ programmer. It appears his intention was to make the language a bit more verbose, as is Pascal and BASIC, to increase ease of use and readability more than exists in C++. A person who used Ruby, would probably find reading and adjusting to Pascal or Lua much easier to do.
Smalltalk gets a bit "weird", because of how they do OO. The structure and syntax used reflects a different way of thinking. Saying that Smalltalk "died", seems to be part of this odd labeling for any language not in the top 10. Are Rust, Kotlin, or Go dead because they never were nor are in the top 10? Smalltalk was never that tremendously popular to begin with, but it certainly didn't die. Go check out Pharo (https://pharo.org/).
Often those who learned C family languages first (C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript...), can feel there is "something wrong" when viewing the syntax and structures of other languages. When everybody only wears dark blue or black, somebody wearing purple or beige could be considered "weird".
The creator of Ruby, Matsumoto, was a C++ programmer. It appears his intention was to make the language a bit more verbose, as is Pascal and BASIC, to increase ease of use and readability more than exists in C++. A person who used Ruby, would probably find reading and adjusting to Pascal or Lua much easier to do.
Smalltalk gets a bit "weird", because of how they do OO. The structure and syntax used reflects a different way of thinking. Saying that Smalltalk "died", seems to be part of this odd labeling for any language not in the top 10. Are Rust, Kotlin, or Go dead because they never were nor are in the top 10? Smalltalk was never that tremendously popular to begin with, but it certainly didn't die. Go check out Pharo (https://pharo.org/).