Unlike the earlier 6502 and z80 machines, the COCO's 6809 CPU was a perfectly fine compilation target for C or Pascal. I never had a COCO so I don't know what was actually available for it, but some friends and I wrote a BCPL back end for 6809 in 1984, for a wire-wrap 2 MHz computer we'd designed ourselves.
People using big computers were of course using compiled languages earlier. I was using a native Pascal compiler for the PDP-11 in 1981. But the end of BASIC on microcomputers started in 1984 with the release of the amazing Turbo Pascal 1.0 for CP/M and MS-DOS for $49.95. There had been compilers for the PC before this but they were huge, slow, and cost $500+. The similar in concept Lightspeed Pascal and C for the Mac arrived in 1986.
By 1987 I was programming in optimised Pascal compiled to m68k machine code on a machine with a 16 MHz full 32 bit CPU (with FPU) and 4 MB RAM. I had a Unixy command line (MPW), proper debuggers, could link with assembly language etc etc.
I'd already been reading about C++ and in late 1988 bought the Zortech C++ compiler to experiment with (in a DOS emulator). Apple had their own C++ for MPW a few months later.
Even Perl, which he uses as the example of modern programming, first appeared in 1988.
Really, the programming language landscape has changed little since 1987.
The main difference is just the capacity and speed of computers, and the rise of the open source Linux OS and much more recently the open source RISC-V instruction set (we haven't seen the full impact yet).