As with most other kids in the 1980s I grew up programming in BASIC. Variables weren’t strongly typed they just held values. Type mismatches were reported at runtime with the ‘Type mismatch at line xx’ error. If you wanted to start running a different piece of code you could simply GOTO whatever line you wanted. BASIC was a great language to learn programming in, you were in charge and the computer did the best to keep up.
Pascal on the other hand was something quite different. Pascal didn’t just run (at least the version we used didn’t), it needed to be compiled first. Variables needed to be declared ahead of time with their type specified before you even used them! No longer could you just jump around the code, instead you had to split the program up into functions and carefully control how they interacted. I hated Pascal. I preferred 6502 assembly (with an instruction set so limited there was no multiply operator) to Pascal.