But decades ago is precisely the timeframe we're talking about here.
Pascal lost to C for the reasons Kernighan mentions (among others), which is the question the OP was asking.
When Java came out in 1996 it became an overnight juggernaut in application development. Java had a ton of hype when it was still in beta in 1995 and TIME magazine even listed it as one of the best products of the year--when it wasn't even released yet.
Microsoft poached Anders Hejlsberg, the primary language designer of Turbo Pascal and Delphi, from Borland in 1996 to have him work J++ their variant of Java. J++ followed the Sun Java spec with a few deviations, but it was just another testament to how quickly Java was taking over.
Borland was now competing with something that was free and they needed to pivot and well...they didn't.
Random articles for further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B
http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,9839...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8460037/list-of-delphi-l...
Arguably what saved Pascal/Object Pascal was the open-source projects of Free Pascal/Lazarus and PascalABC (popular in Russia). Plus there were huge fans of Turbo Pascal, who got it released as freeware, as Borland had switched to selling the Delphi IDE.
This combination (Free Pascal/Lazarus, freeware Turbo Pascal, PascalABC, etc...) of open-source freeware Pascal eventually put pressure on Embarcadero to release the free Delphi Community Edition (2018). That was 5 to 10 years late in the game. A lot of user base and previous strong fans had significantly diminished.
However, it does appear that Object Pascal has found a decent level, at presently between the top 15 to 20 programming languages (were it was between top 1 to 10 in the 80s and 90s). It is possible for Object Pascal to see a bit of a resurgence, based around the free open-source dialects of Pascal and Embarcadero's strong push to put Delphi in schools (example- Turkey bought 1 million licenses for their schools or South Africa replacing Java with Delphi).
Look at which one is being used to this day to write essentially every modern operating system, and even the interpreters and compilers for other languages. JavaScript engines are written in C, not Pascal.
I think it obviously did lose, though judging from the moderation it clearly still has some fanatical followers.
Both Turbo Pascal and Object Pascal had so many extra non-standard and un-Pascal-like features that they were barely even the same language.
As I mentioned in another comment, allowing you to write bare assembly language inline wasn't exactly a feature of the original Wirth Pascal. The analogy I used at the time was that (Wirth) Pascal was like a pair of blunt-pointed kindergarten scissors, while C was more like a chainsaw. Borland added enough non-standard features to make it more like maybe a kitchen knife, but in the long run that still wasn't enough.
Which one? Unless you forgot to type ++.
On what basis do you say this? Was Turbo Pascal, say, leagues ahead of Turbo C?
Also considering that most of the complains were fixed in Modula-2, made available initially in 1978.
And, the article was about Pascal, not about Modula-2. Are you wishing he had also written an article about Modula-2 that you could also critize, maybe for not being about Modula-3 or Oberon instead?
