Pascal might not be weird but it is unpleasant. It has many inconveniences to offer the modern programmer. In its day, in comparison to C -- by programmers for programmers -- Pascal was derided by one computer scientist as "a police-state language" for its many strictures and missing affordances.
Pascal is designed to be safe, like Rust is. Pascal was missing some things needed for systems programming but those were added in Pascal's sequel, Modula-2, whose sequel, Oberon, ended up being a very nice language.
It's too bad Modula-2 didn't come along earlier to compete with C. We could have avoided most of the security problems with C and C++ programs.
Instead, here we are, 50 years later, finally moving toward safe languages again. Took long enough.
Some people loved it, some hated it. Some (this includes me) used it where it did offer advantage. I do not use Pascal to write servers (even though I could and did for some particular situations). I use maily C++ for it. But for developing lean and mean desktop GUI apps for multiple platform I find nothing better. Also I am not sure what pascal are you talking about. The one "derided by comp scientists" and current Delphi/FreePascal are one universe apart.
Confession. Learnt Pascal at Uni. Programmed in Compas Pascal 1984 (precursor to Turbo Pascal) then Turbo Pascal 3.0 from 1986-1993. Then from 1997 to the present day worked with Delphi (2,3,4,5,7, XE7 and XE 10.1). I wrote a 40,000 line Postal Game in 1989-1990 in TP 5.0 that still runs today.
Original Pascal was dire at anything except learning Pascal. Strings were type alfa- 10 character strings. Turbo Pascal was the first decent implementation and whipped the pants off its rival UCSD-Pascal. Delphi has been dead though since about 2000 but there's a lot of legacy code around and I'm one of a team of four that look after (maintain and enhance) a 1.35 million Lines of code property management application. A business laptop from 2020 can compile all 1.35 millions lines in around 11 seconds.
Unless you were an ace C++ Windows developer, Delphi was the next best programming language for using the Win32 API and doing low level COM stuff.
It is and it is not. It is used in many industrial companies for example to write windows based desktop applications. I have couple of my own Windows based products that bring some money. Even though those are about 10 years old I keep them up to date with all new technologies that make sense and port to every new version of Delphi. This is actually very easy and does not require much time. There is also more than enough libraries and components to do just about anything. FFS I do interrupt based device control with the rate of 256 requests / s over USB.
Still for servers / NO GUI I very much prefer C++.
