Pascal is a complete nightmare to start people off with if they are going to move on to a language like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, C# or Java.

It's superficially similar but it has all kinds of archaic quirks and lacks basic affordances like return values or short-circuiting (i.e. in order to evaluate `a AND b` Pascal evaluates both).

You might as well argue that beginners should start with Assembly. If you want to be unnecessarily cruel at least teach them something useful like C/C++.