Pascal
Hacker ApprovedRanked 49 of 163 programming languages by recommenders
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.
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.
56 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 38
- criticize it
- 18
- approval share
- 68%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 38 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.1 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Clear, readable, easy-to-learn syntax
“Pascal is really good for educational purposes. The language syntax is very clear and easy to understand”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “PascalABC.net” “The easiest to learn would be a language where you have to define all variable types on top, like Pascal”
Comment from 6 May 2026 in “I completed 100 Days of Java over 5 years and mapped the journey as a graph” “Pascal-like languages fell out of favour, despite having higher readability.”
Comment from 20 Jan 2026 in “Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs” - Comment from 7 Jul 2026 in “The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth”
- Comment from 7 Dec 2025 in “Perl's decline was cultural”
- Comment from 29 Nov 2025 in “PEP 638 – Syntactic Macros”
Excellent for teaching programming
“Pascal is really good for educational purposes. The language syntax is very clear and easy to understand”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “PascalABC.net” “Pascal was an excellent educational tool, but for a decade had enormous business impact, too.”
Comment from 26 Sep 2026 in “Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers” “good compilers for languages like PASCAL which was great for CS education”
Comment from 5 Nov 2025 in “Ask HN: Stories from Users of Minicomputers and Mainframes” - Comment from 1 Jun 2026 in “Is Python Becoming Pinyin?”
Strong typing and safer memory
“I always found Pascal more intuitive, especially for string handling than C”
Comment from 3 Nov 2025 on Hacker News “The syntax is clean and is strongly typed, which I understand LLMs like.”
Comment from 18 May 2026 in “Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?” “Heap memory handling in Pascal, Modula-2, Ada, is much safer than C”
Comment from 6 Feb 2026 in “C Isn't a Language” Good GUI and business app tools
“Pascal had some really nice out-of-the-box tools for GUI work”
Comment from 10 Mar 2026 in “So you want to write an "app" (2025)” “For that time and task (accounting app), Pascal was great.”
Comment from 21 Jun 2026 in “AI Has Broken Hiring”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Not suited to systems programming
“Pascal has serious limitations for engineering a whole computer system”
Comment from 6 Aug 2026 in “Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language (1981) [pdf]” “Pascal as originally designed wasn't suitable for systems programming”
Comment from 5 Nov 2025 in “This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm” “Pascal, as defined by Wirth, had no "low level" features”
Comment from 24 Apr 2026 in “Writing a C Compiler, in Zig” Small community and few users
“An important reason against Pascal is the tiny community.”
Comment from 3 Nov 2025 on Hacker News “I don't know anyone who uses them for anything serious.”
Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “What Killed Perl?” Expensive commercial compilers
“Borland was affordable; Microsoft Pascal and C were not.”
Comment from 10 Sep 2026 on Hacker News “priced it way out of the reach of hobbyists”
Comment from 3 Sep 2026 in “Altair Basic Interpreter Source Code (1975) [pdf]”
Other programming languages people recommend
The four most recommended other programming languages, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 163 programming languages, rankedWhat people said
40 of the 65 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“There is some interesting innovation going on in the Pascal community”
“most of those extensions ended up in ISO Extended Pascal revision”
“Pascal was an excellent educational tool, but for a decade had enormous business impact, too.”
“Go and Rust (and Pascal) have cleaned up C's awful legacy”
“If you want to write applications use Pascal, Java, C#, Swift or Go”
“Borland was affordable; Microsoft Pascal and C were not.”
“priced it way out of the reach of hobbyists”
“And verbose. Very verbose... And calling win API was a horror”
“Pascal was the microcomputer language of choice before C++ took over”
“Pascal has serious limitations for engineering a whole computer system”
“Pascal is very readable, and ^Char is nicer than char* even if inconsistently concise”
“you need an application programming language like Pascal or Java”
“I was impressed by the functions with a name to which you can pass arguments”
“Pascal is simple and clear, and can be translated easily to anything”
“I'd still recommend Pascal over Python”
“For that time and task (accounting app), Pascal was great.”
“where some of the mistakes had been corrected”
“I started out with Pascal, and I'm glad I did.”
“The syntax is clean and is strongly typed, which I understand LLMs like.”
“instead of doing enumerations like Pascal in 1976”
“The easiest to learn would be a language where you have to define all variable types on top, like Pascal”
“Dijkstra's go-to language (pun intended) was Algol 60 (& Pascal)”
“Pascal or Java have the "dangling else" problem, but it's manageable”
“Pascal, as defined by Wirth, had no "low level" features”
“Pascal had some really nice out-of-the-box tools for GUI work”
“I prefer Wirth syntax languages with keyworded blocks and := assignment operators”
“Pascal is really good for educational purposes. The language syntax is very clear and easy to understand”
“Heap memory handling in Pascal, Modula-2, Ada, is much safer than C”
“Pascal-like languages fell out of favour, despite having higher readability.”
“wonderful gifts for us to receive from their designers”
“He solved them with pascal and its OO successors”
“Do it in Ada, SPARK, Zig, Rust, Pascal, Crystal, etc.”
“I also remember it being simpler to pick up.”
“It's straightforward, capable, easy to read.”
“I don't know anyone who uses them for anything serious.”
“that might have been nice compared to Pascal in 1975”
“good compilers for languages like PASCAL which was great for CS education”
“Pascal as originally designed wasn't suitable for systems programming”
“An important reason against Pascal is the tiny community.”
“I always found Pascal more intuitive, especially for string handling than C”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.