Learn Pascal (or BASIC) because that's what programming is
An old model or guideline was retired in favor of a new one.
TaughtComputer class means BASIC or Pascal. The Advanced Placement Computer Science exam is taught in Pascal, so that is the language you learn to think in.
NowAP Computer Science moved to C++ in 1999, then to Java in 2004. Python overtook everything as the introductory language, and by 2024 was the most popular language on GitHub. Pascal and BASIC have effectively vanished from schools.
What actually happened
Pascal was designed by Niklaus Wirth in 1970 specifically to teach structured programming, and it did that job for a generation. The College Board dropped it for C++ in 1999 and for Java in 2004, and each switch stranded teachers who had built a decade of materials. AP Computer Science Principles, added in 2016, is deliberately language-agnostic, which is a quiet admission that betting a curriculum on one language ages badly.
Python won the introductory slot largely by accident of ecosystem. MIT switched its famous intro course from Scheme to Python in 2008, and the rise of data science and machine learning pulled everything else along. GitHub's Octoverse report put Python at number one in 2024, driven by AI work.
The genuinely useful thing here is what did not change. Loops, conditionals, recursion, data structures, and decomposition transfer across every one of these languages. Anyone who learned to program in BASIC on a machine that booted to a prompt still knows how to program. The syntax you were drilled on is a museum piece; the reasoning is not.
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Sources
- College Board: AP Computer Science Aapcentral.collegeboard.org
- GitHub Octoverse: The state of open sourceoctoverse.github.com
Who was taught this
Still standard through 2003, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2004 learned the earlier version.