7 May
2010
7 May
'10
4:18 p.m.
On 7 May 2010 at 15:45, Fred Cisin wrote:
FORTRAN was on the 704. (1954)
704/709, very similar, but you're right--the 704 FORTRAN was first,
the 709 didn't escape until 1958.
Dijkstra:
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be
regarded as a criminal offense. APL is a mistake, carried through to
perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming
techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
FORTRAN, 'the infantile disorder', by now nearly 20 years old, is
hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in
mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments,
just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share
each other's programs, bugs included. It is practically impossible to
teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to
BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond
hope of regeneration.
Yet, Edsgar is dead and Fortran (with F90, lowercase "Fortran" was
endorsed by X3J3 as an alternate spelling) is still going strong.
As far as his criticism of BASIC, it depends on what one calls
"BASIC". Visual BASIC is far, far from Kemeny and Kurtz, but there's
always "True BASIC" http://truebasic.com/ which is still pretty
distant from Dartmouth BASIC.
I wonder if FORTRAN/Fortran programmers speak better assembly than
Perl programmers do?
--Chuck