Yea!
Pascal is a
dead language! (As is
modula.)
Long live Delphi (and
Java). Object Pascal aka Delphi is no more pascal than
C++ is
C (in fact, less so). Delphi is actually a descendant of
Object Pascal, which itself is not a standardized language, and has actually confirmed the worst of Kernighan's fears. Note that Delphi does not follow any of
the standards, not even the Object Pascal draft or the later extended pascal
standards. For details, see my writeup in
Object Pascal.
I don't think that Kernighan's article is wrong so much
as dated. His points are as valid today as they were
when he wrote them -- they just don't all apply to Delphi or Object Pascal. It is important for a working language
to have the features he complains
his pascal did not have.
We must not forget our history. Object Pascal was created by Apple in 1985, and not adopted by Borland until 1989.
This paper (1981) must be taken in its historical context, as it almost certainly influenced the development of Extended Pascal (1983) and Object Pascal (1985).
If nothing else, this paper is a good study of what features are need in a good programming language.
I spent many hours with Pascal in various Computer Science
courses, and then spent even more hours in C.
IMHO C and C++ are horrible as a teaching language--it's too easy to hang yourself. I can only
hope
that java makes up for it to fill the gap.
Jumping between them doesn't seem too painful.
Many universities used pascal
in their introductory programming courses,
although many are or have switched from pascal (to modula) to java.
Some may have stuck with Borland and picked up Delphi rather than switching to a completely new language. A few have used lisp or scheme, and I've heard of exotics such as postscript also being used.
Modula might have made it with a good (Borland?) compiler.
Oberon seems to have gone the way of Modula.
My impression is that the authors of Eiffel didn't release
their compiler/interpreter for free academic use soon enough to catch the trend--perhaps it wasn't enough better than SmallTalk to replace it the way Java seems to have.
2017 update: the latest teaching language of choice is
Python. I won't go into its benefits and warts here.
Enjoy the pipe links.