The Bottom 10 - Come on now!
<PERSONAL RANT - Not To Be Construed To Be The Opinions of My Employer>
Ok, well according to John Dvorak I contributed to the #9 item on the "The Bottom 10 Worst Software Disasters"!
Specifically, I'm one of those guys who produced one of the "numerous iterations of cheap Pascal " - Pascal/MT+. It had many variations for the 8080/Z80, 8086 and 68K (manual in PDF format for 68K found here).
I have been writing compilers since 1970 and Pascal/MT+ was a very successful product by 1980's standards (sales > $40M!). The first version of Pascal/MT (copied in my bedroom onto 8-inch floppy diskettes) sold for $49.95 and was used by companies like IBM and GE to build embedded systems in 1980. It eventually morphed into a "large" (for the time) system that included a compiler, linker, debugger, and full-screen text editor.
Pascal/MT+ was one of the first PC-based languages to have an IDE - built-in editor, syntax checker and compiler. It ran on a 64k Z80 (note that's k not MB)! This was in 1980!, TurboPascal, according to Borland's website, shipped November 20, 1983!
Pascal/MT+ was used to create many successful products as well as the first version of CP/M 68K (in 1982).
So while I agree that Pascal has gone out of fashion I don't think that our (the compiler writer community) collective efforts to raise the level of development abstraction (everyone who was anyone in 1979 wrote in assembly language [and argued about which set of mnemonics to use!]) deserves to be categorized in quite this fashion.
C'mon John, certainly you can find something else for that list... how about EasyWriter?
</PERSONAL RANT>
