# Pascal

38 Hacker News commenters recommended Pascal and 18 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People recommend Pascal for its clear, readable syntax and its value for teaching programming. The most common caveat is that standard Pascal lacked low-level features and suited systems programming poorly.

## Why people recommend it

- Clear, readable, easy-to-learn syntax (6 comments): "Pascal is really good for educational purposes. The language syntax is very clear and easy to understand" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47049137)) "The easiest to learn would be a language where you have to define all variable types on top, like Pascal" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48031914)) "Pascal-like languages fell out of favour, despite having higher readability." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46689075))
- Excellent for teaching programming (4 comments): "Pascal is really good for educational purposes. The language syntax is very clear and easy to understand" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47049137)) "Pascal was an excellent educational tool, but for a decade had enormous business impact, too." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49861036)) "good compilers for languages like PASCAL which was great for CS education" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824942))
- Strong typing and safer memory (3 comments): "I always found Pascal more intuitive, especially for string handling than C" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45797336)) "The syntax is clean and is strongly typed, which I understand LLMs like." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48178419)) "Heap memory handling in Pascal, Modula-2, Ada, is much safer than C" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911493))
- Good GUI and business app tools (2 comments): "Pascal had some really nice out-of-the-box tools for GUI work" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47318285)) "For that time and task (accounting app), Pascal was great." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48622453))

## What people warn about

- Not suited to systems programming (3 comments): "Pascal has serious limitations for engineering a whole computer system" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49202705)) "Pascal as originally designed wasn't suitable for systems programming" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822571)) "Pascal, as defined by Wirth, had no "low level" features" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47893235))
- Small community and few users (2 comments): "An important reason against Pascal is the tiny community." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45797711)) "I don't know anyone who uses them for anything serious." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45983854))
- Expensive commercial compilers (2 comments): "Borland was affordable; Microsoft Pascal and C were not." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650138)) "priced it way out of the reach of hobbyists" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49549684))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Rust](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rust.md): 2039 recommend
- [Go](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-programming-language.md): 1254 recommend
- [Python](https://hackerapproved.com/p/python.md): 1067 recommend
- [Zig](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zig.md): 743 recommend
- [TypeScript](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typescript.md): 574 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Pascal", https://hackerapproved.com/p/pascal/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).