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Pascal was the first language where programming clicked for me. Pascal also happens to be my given last name, which makes it just a bit more special to me.

Funnily enough I learned Pascal using Turbo Pascal which makes me sound older than I am, because I learned Pascal around 2010 and my high school's CS department was just way behind the times. By that point we were using a nearly 20 year-old 16 bit compiler in Windows XP.

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I always find weird when schools use Turbo Pascal instead of Free Pascal considering Free Pascal's IDE looks pretty much the same as Turbo Pascal 7 but also works on in any OS.

Inertia and/or lack of knowledge, likely. There are colleges in India which even today use Turbo C (maybe v2.0) as the tool to teach C, for example, even though there are things like Bloodshed Dev-C++ and GCC - GCC even on Windows via probably Cygwin, MinGW, or WSL (not checked if GCC works on all those, think I have seen it on 1 or 2 of them).

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