As a med student I followed an introduction course on programming in MUMPS, which was great fun.
I didn't have a PC then (hardly anyone had, they were expensive), so only later I took up programming again.
At the time I was unemployed and bored. A friend gave me a copy of Turbo Pascal 3.0 and a book on structural programming. The manual that came with TP was in Hebrew, so not helpfull at all to me.
I started to learn how to program, and I really loved the fact that Pascal in itself is a structured language (ever tried MUMPS??).
The compiler was lightning fast as well.
Later in an attempt to learn a "mature language", I tried C.
That horrified me.
I could not and still cannot get my head around it.
If you can read English, and you have some basic knowledge of logic, then you can understand a basic Pascal program, even if you never programmed in your life.
With C, I get lost after the first 2, max 3 lines of code.
So, I fell in love with Pascal long time ago, I had a fling with C and flead back.
From all this you can see I'm an amateur, and always wil be.
A pro would be able to learn C and more languages, and then choose the language that most suited the job at hand.
For what I want to do, Pascal can do what I need.
And it does that cross-platform.
To me, it's just a matter of taste.
Bart