I learned Pascal and MODULA-2 in college, in my first two programming semesters. MODULA-2 was removed shortly afterwards but Pascal is still used in the introductory programming course. I'm very happy to have had these as the languages that introduced me to programming and Wirth occupies a very special place in my heart. His designs were truly ahead of their time.
I had Pascal and some Modula as well (on concurrent programming course).
I learned C++ later myself as a Pascal with bizzare syntax. I always felt like semantics of C++ was taken entirely from Pascal. No two lanuages ever felt closer to each other for me. Like one was just reskin of the other.
I already told this story multiple times, when I came to learn C, I already knew Turbo Pascal since 4.0 up to 6.0, luckly the same teacher that was teaching us about C, also had access to Turbo C++ 1.0 for MS-DOS.
I adopted C++ right away as the sensible path beyond Turbo Pascal for cross-platform code, and never seen a use for C primitive and insecure code, beyond being asked to use it in specific university projects, and some jobs during the dotcom wave.
On Usenet C vs C++ flamewars, there might be still some replies from me on the C++ side.
I learned C that way (algorithms class was in C), even had a little printout table of the different syntaxs for the same instructions (here's how you write a for, if, record, declare a variable, etc). At the time I remember thinking that the C syntax was much uglier, and that opinion has stayed with me since -- when I learned Python everything just seemed so natural.
