Pascal
/pas-KAL/ · noun · Development · Origin: 1970
Definitions
A structured programming language designed primarily for teaching good programming practices. Pascal influenced many subsequent languages and was popularized by Borland's Turbo Pascal IDE. While largely superseded, its descendant Delphi still has a dedicated following, and Pascal's design philosophy lives on in languages like Ada and Modula-2.
In plain English: An older programming language designed to teach people how to write well-organized code, popular in the 1980s and 90s.
Example: Half the senior developers I know learned to program in Turbo Pascal on a 286 with a green monochrome monitor.
Origin Story
A teaching language named after the first mechanical calculator's inventor
Niklaus Wirth designed Pascal in 1970 as a language to teach structured programming and data structuring. He named it after **Blaise Pascal**, the 17th-century French mathematician who built the **Pascaline**, one of the first mechanical calculators.
Pascal enforced clean programming habits: `BEGIN...END` blocks, strong typing, and explicit variable declarations. It was deliberately restrictive -- Wirth believed constraints made better programmers. Critics, notably Brian Kernighan, disagreed, writing the famous essay "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language."
Despite academic controversy, Pascal became hugely popular through Borland's **Turbo Pascal** (1983), which compiled blazingly fast on IBM PCs. Anders Hejlsberg wrote Turbo Pascal before going on to create Delphi and later C# -- carrying Pascal's DNA into Microsoft's flagship language.
Coined by: Niklaus Wirth
Context: ETH Zurich, 1970
Fun fact: Wirth also created Modula-2 and Oberon after Pascal. He won the Turing Award in 1984. 'Wirth's law' states that software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster -- a observation that remains painfully accurate.