The Pascal/Object Pascal story is quite interesting. It goes to show how important corporate backing and luck are to the popularity of programming languages.
Indeed. Check out its successor Oberon by the same creator. It's modern, simple and powerful. The whole language definition is just 17 pages - https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Oberon/Oberon07.Report.pdf ... and yet, no PR behind it, so it is nowhere near the popularity of even the fading Pascal.
