I was a huge fan of Pascal and still have fond memories - I'd still argue it is a good starting point for teaching programming principles. It's easy to pick faults in any language {Y} and compare it against {X} which is way better. I don't think that is really helpful as it ignores whatever practicalities for the time/place led to the choice of {Y}.

Anyway, I always got a chuckle from the fortune cookie :

Niklaus Wirth has lamented that, whereas Europeans pronounce his name correctly (Ni-klows Virt), Americans invariably mangle it into (Nick-les Worth). Which is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value.

(http://www.j0zf.com/fortune_cookies.php?te_class=fortune_coo...)

Wirth also created successors to Pascal and co-created an operating system and the hardware it ran/runs on.