In fact, my recollection is the AP computer science curriculum was in pascal until around 2000.

For real haha. I forgot to include asm and Visual Basic.

VB was looked down on back then but look at low/no code now.

Perl/Python was at the start for me, scripting was a parallel lane to coding.

Highest respect is always held for TCL.

I think almost all of us started with BASIC. Then we all wanted to do more... and with more memory and do it faster... so I needed a compiled language.

So, I learned C, then Pascal, then VisualBasic. C forever corrupted me.

Then C++ was the future, so I learned that... and then the web came... and with it came CGI scripting with Perl. I really fell in love with Python, though. It was what BASIC should have been, but Python was slow, so I learned Go. Along the way I also learned Prolog, Lisp, Java, Javascript, Rexx and a host of different OS scripting languages. Now, I just look at a problem, and pick something that fits. Mostly. Except when I want to learn something new.

My path was (C64) Basic -> Quick Basic -> (Borland) C++ -> (x86) asm -> Java -> Python. Mostly.

There's some Ruby, plain C, Lisp, Haskell, C# in there, and lately Ocaml and Rust. And lots of shell scripting in between. Never needed Pascal, and I stay away from Perl. Clojure is still on my wishlist, as is Scala (because of Spark, mostly).

BASIC (GW & Apple) was ubiquitous, but a BASIC compiler was incredibly difficult to find, even illicitly. And 13-year-old me had no hope of purchasing it for $500.

for me it was VB at home, turbo pascal at school, TI-86 basic for "cheating" at school (is it really cheating if you had to learn the math to write the program?). Then HTML+JS for websites, python and C++ for college, PHP for internship, C because I wanted to learn how PHP worked, and then onwards into real life.

(Actually it was back to the beginning as my first job was VB6+PL/PGSQL)

Almost perfectly matches mine, though you can put Logo before Basic. And some weird stuff between C++ / Perl, based on the language du jour in the Computer Science department. Plus Java. Don't forget Java.