An interesting observation

[bearophile]

BCS:
> Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, 
> PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++.
> The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: 
> C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp.

Pascal used to have lots of advantages over C, and not just to teach programming (Pascal programs were more reliable. Its modern variants like ObjectPascal have some advantages even over D still, like a better management of division (with slash and div), better automatic type conversion (like the upcasting management I have shown here some time ago), etc.).
Ada variants today too are not easy to beat for very high integrity programming (the main purpose it was designed for).
And C++ despite its very large amount of flaws runs most of my (fast) desktop apps.
Per is quite used still (but probably less, due to Python and Ruby that are better for most purposes but the creation of little text processing scripts), but it's as messy as C++ or worse...

Bye,
bearophile