On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 5:52 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
We lost computer pioneer John Backus on this day in 2007; amongst other things he gave us FORTRAN (yuck!) and BNF, which is ironic, really, because FORTRAN has no syntax to speak of
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Dave -- please be careful about the disparaging comments.
As a system's person, I don't need to write in it, (although I can understand it when I need too) and neither do I believe many of our colleagues in the system business; since it is not the right thing for my or their needs. But Fortran has a place and it still pays my and many of our salaries (and I happen to know it paid the salary if a number of folks on this list and I think, like me still does).
I'll save people on the list from the full argument and try to keep a flame war from starting but I offer that you instead read: Clem Cole's answer to Is Fortran Still Alive and
Simply out (and for those) that don't want to reads the more details arguments - please don't try to compare Fortran to C, Pascal, Java, Rust etc. or many other languages - please do not knock it because you don't need to use it or look down on those that do use because it helps them. But, instead remember that is in your toolbox, has been and is an appropriate solution for many problems, and is likely to continue to be for many years.
Are their 'better' tools, like the QUERTY keyboard? Sure but they not economically interesting. I ask you to please be kind before you make disparaging comments. As I point out in those answer, even if I could wave wand and have all those oce that we have today magically rewritten into a modern language from C to Rust or something else that strikes your fancy, there is no way it would be economical (much less wise) to try to revalidate the years and years of data that Fortran based codes have created.
As I close, I try to remember that many Frenchman have been historical annoyed because French, which is said to be a 'pure and beautiful' did not become the universal world language, and the wretched and crass anglo saxon English did. Yet many 'British' be moan that 'American' is not English either. And many 'merkins' can hardly understand people in many parts of the world . It does not make either anyone language better than the other. Both are useful - communications is passing information between to parties and they all usually get the job done, some more easily than others.
Today's Fortran is not, the language Backus and team at IBM created in the late 1950s. Like English (or 'American English' maybe), it has morphed a bit and taken ideas from other languages.