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Define "successful language". Popularity of a programming language doesn't mean success. COBOL, Fortran and Pascal used to be hugely popular, now with every passing year, it is costing more and more money to support systems that once considered as "successfully built".

Sadly, it seems in a few decades, pretty much that would be the fate of every single PL in TIOBE's Top. All popular PLs of today are morally outdated. Programming languages of future would be striving for:

a) Developer's productivity

b) Execution performance

c) Correctness of the program

And none of the popular languages today are making good progress in any of those directions.



Pascal has never been popular. Certain offshoots of Pascal got popular, none so much as Delphi. Which some people still use.


Maybe not in the US. It was pretty popular for example in the USSR back in 1980-90ies.


I bet it was some dialect with non-standard extensions to make it actually useful. Like all the ones ever actually used, but different.




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