programming-for-dummies

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Teaching Languages
Without even knowing much about programming, you can figure out what
the preceding Pascal program does, just because Pascal commands consist
of descriptive words. Now take a look at the equivalent C program, which is
fairly easy to understand, but littered with cryptic characters and symbols:
#include
main()
{
printf (“Hello World!\n”);
}
Although Pascal combined the best features from BASIC and C, Pascal’s
popularity also plummeted because of these similarities, too.
BASIC started adopting structured programming techniques, which made BASIC
easier to understand than Pascal but just as easy to write organized programs
like Pascal. On the other extreme, C started adopting similar structured programming
techniques as well, so you had the power of C with nearly all the
advantages of structured programming emphasized by Pascal. Given a choice
between using Pascal, which was almost as easy to use as BASIC and almost
as powerful as C, or using BASIC (which was easier to figure out than Pascal)
or C (which was more powerful than Pascal), programmers found few reasons
to use Pascal any more.
Despite Pascal’s fading popularity, you can still understand Pascal as a first
language and then find a job writing and modifying Pascal programs.
However, Pascal programmers aren’t in as much demand as C programmers,
so study Pascal to better understand good programming principles and then
apply those skills to writing programs in other languages.
The inventor of Pascal, Niklaus Wirth, eventually created an improved version
of Pascal dubbed Modula-2. The U.S. Department of Defense created a similar
programming language, called Ada, which was also based on Pascal. Like
Modula-2, Ada was designed to encourage structured programming and
allow programmers to create and manage large programs by storing subprograms
in separate files called modules (in Modula-2) and packages (in Ada).
Other teaching languages
Although BASIC, Logo, and Pascal may be the more popular teaching languages
available, plenty of other people have created their own languages to
teach people how to program a computer. Because these languages are
developed by individuals or companies, they’re proprietary languages — a
single company or individual controls the language. (In comparison, languages
like BASIC, Logo, and Pascal all have official “standards,” although
most companies that offer BASIC, Logo, or Pascal compilers often deviate
from the official “standard” anyway.)