> So, i generally considered Pascal a dead language.
Essentially it's dead. Though, looking at all the people trying to learn programming using dynamic languages with managed memory, I really regret that there is no good low-level language targeting learners as ubiquitous as Pascal was. I still advice those who can't grasp basic concepts and data structures (like reference, identity, passing by value, etc) to spend some time with Pascal and some old school-level Pascal books. For some reason that usually works better than K&R and C. I guess it's just about the language being lot simpler and not enforcing extensive pointer operations.
> I really regret that there is no good low-level language targeting learners as ubiquitous as Pascal was
Some people are betting that Rust will be that language - and it probably can be a viable first programming language if all you're writing is toy programs with trivial use of dynamic memory, like you probably would when learning Pascal. It certainly has better chances than C++.
For low-level code, I think Carbon may fill that niche in the future. If it doesn't, C++ may be a good candidate once up-to-date books have been written and compilers actually support the modern spec. Classrooms/guides would need to move away from the still-lingering "C++ is C with classes" approach and use the standard library before that can be a reality, but this book[0] by Bjarne Stroustrup himself demonstrates the future C++ _could_ have if all the modern language features become usable.
In business, C++ will still be the domain of ancient clusterfucks compiled by MSVC++ 6 in many areas, similar to how most Java code is still built around Java 8 because that was the most recent stable version for many projects' lifecycle (and Oracle's decision to only ship JRE 8 to consumers doesn't help) and how .NET 4 is still taught in schools because the new and scary dotnet tool doesn't map 1-to-1 with the old way of working. I can't imagine microcontroller toolkits supporting a modern version of _any_ language in the first place.
However, if more people would learn modern C++ (or a replacement, like Carbon), I think this class of programming languages can have the same growth and hype Rust has enjoyed for the past years.
I'm keeping my eye on Carbon and Zig. Google's influence has managed to push Go to the forefront despite its many quirks, and Zig seems to be focused on doing "C, but right" rather than "C++, but right" which so far is looking pretty promising.
It's also fun to see Jakt[1] being developed in real time; I don't think it's a language that will be useful for production software any time soon, but on the other hand it's a language that actually produces binaries reliably (unlike pre-alpha Carbon or pre-release Zig, the latter exposing many problems after switching to a self-hosted compiler).