Sorry for being a bit pedantic, it predates Modula-2, Niklaus Wirth got in contact with it during his first sabbatical at Xerox PARC, after returning to ETHZ Modula was born, and shortly thereafter Modula-2 and Lillth Workstation, with the OS written in Modula-2.

Several years later, a similar encounter with Mesa's evolution, Mesa/Cedar, gave birth to Oberon.

As for being ahead of its time, very much indeed.

Many people relate to Smalltalk and Interlisp-D, and are unaware of strong typed systems programming at Xerox, with a tooling that only decades cater came to be.

Mesa authors were quite adamant that in order to succeed, Mesa had to support comparable tooling to Smalltalk and Interlisp-D environments.