Bucky Wirth didn't just invent Pascal. Pascal grew out of a proposal to improve Algol. The Algol committee turned it down and picked someone else's, more complicated, idea instead. That became Algol 68 and killed the language forever. As a result, we got other languages that were the indirect offspring of Algol: which took Algol's ideas and changed them. Languages such as BCPL, which was turned into B, which became C – and C++ and everything built from them.
A hobby of mine is trying to clearly define some of what I call the Big Lies in computing. In 2022 I wrote thatget are licenses that say we own the right to use one copy, or if you own a business, so many copies… and anyway, you don't get the source code, or any kind of guarantee. These CPU components aren't the only bits that are getting faster: computers' other subsystems are improving, too. Memory is getting faster. Solid state storage is getting faster, although, the most exciting kind of non-volatile memory – a bold attempt to bypass a whole pile of legacy bottlenecks and move non-volatile storage right onto the CPU memory bus – flopped. It was killed by legacy software designs.
This industry is, by nature, unable to adapt to a world where that no longer happens – and never will again. The result is spiralling software bloat..