Pascal isn't necessarily the worst choice to learn programming in. After all, it was designed from the ground up for education and Delphi is one of the few environments around sporting a vb-style GUI creation interface. In high school, when i could barely program i still managed to utilize delphi to run some physics calculations. I suppose Java or C# makes more sense at the college level. But below that when the vast majority arent going to be programmers and the goal is to get them an idea of what programming is about i could think of few superior choices, if any.