It's hard for me not to see this as a proto HN post from before HN existed.

Although obviously Brian Kernighan is more accomplished than most of the guys writing "Why React is unsuitable for modern web development" blog posts or the like.

I love Pascal, as it was the first programming language that I ever learned (ignoring machine languages) and so I have an irrational fondness for it.

That said, I agree with Kernighan here, for real-world use it's not even in my top 10 favorite langauges.