In the 80s, was the PC best for learning to program due to Turbo Pascal?

My parents bought a TRS-80 Coco for $400 in 1981. I had the power supply burn out and then replaced it with a Coco 3 as soon as the Coco 3 came out. Around 1987 I switched to a 286 PC that cost $1200 inclusive of a monochrome monitor, a 1.2 MB floppy drive and a hard drive.

When I add up everything I spent on the Coco (2 disk drives, disk controller, multi pack, UART serial card, music card, Tandy branded tape deck, joysticks, special monitor, software, modem, ..) it added up to more than what I spent on my first PC,

With the Coco I learned to program in BASIC, Assembly and C. I also wrote my own FORTH.

The 286 was crazy fast and affordable to alternatives like the Mac 2. Turbo Pascal was my favorite language to work with on the PC, but I switched to C when I went to college because it was portable to Sun workstations. In terms of performance a good 286 machine beat the pants off the old 8-bit machines: my first experience using a software emulator was writing BASIC programs for a CP/M system under an emulator that ran faster than a real Z-80 computer.

It really didn't matter, any generic clone was fine, as they all ran MS-DOS. The gold standard compatibility test for the day was the ability to run Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Turbo Pascal was a cheap, fast, and productive platform. The printed manual, built-in help and libraries were awesome. Hitting F1 on almost any bit of source got you help that included a working example of the thing you were trying out.

[Edit] What made the IBM-PC clones amazing was the shareware scene, you could get any programming language you wanted under the sun, with a bunch of libraries, for $2 at your local computer club, and it was all pretty good stuff.

That massive wave of programs that just worked was astounding. Check out the Internet Archive, there's almost everything from SimTel, etc.

No, because you had to pay extra for Turbo Pascal.

Most PCs came with GW Basic. Most home computers came with some dialect of Basic.

If you didn’t already know how to program, why would you pay extra for Turbo Pascal?