I learned BASIC in high school, so I'm mentally mutilated, but with that said, my dad got me a copy of Turbo Pascal for my birthday, in the early 80s. He knew virtually nothing about computers, but had read an article in the Wall Street Journal about it. And my older brother was learning Pascal in college.
The manuals were a joy. I read them cover to cover. I think I only skipped one update, up through version 5, and was still using it long after MS-DOS was obsolete.
Today, in my rare moments of writing good code, I program like a Pascal programmer. I think you can easily do worse, but it's hard to do much better. One of the ideas that was prevalent at the time, was that as you learned programming, you should also be learning good programming practices.
The manuals were a joy. I read them cover to cover. I think I only skipped one update, up through version 5, and was still using it long after MS-DOS was obsolete.
Today, in my rare moments of writing good code, I program like a Pascal programmer. I think you can easily do worse, but it's hard to do much better. One of the ideas that was prevalent at the time, was that as you learned programming, you should also be learning good programming practices.