Fortran Man
The developer of Fortran died Tuesday.
Back in the 1950s, John Backus was a young IBM computer scientist when his team developed one of the first high-level computer programming languages. Fortran was certainly the first programming language used by engineers and scientists for their work.
And Fortran was the first computer language I ever learned. In 1972, every freshman engineer at Michigan had to take a semester of Fortran. It was one of my favorite classes. One where I learned the specialized syntax of do-loops, arithmetic if-statements, computed go-tos, functions, and subroutines. I've used Fortran much of my career. It is an important skill that helped me earn my living. For me, hearing John Backus has died is a lot like a carpenter hearing that the guy who invented the hammer has died.
Programmers today sniff and scoff at Fortran, like it somehow isn't important. But for many scientific and engineering applications, Fortran still - after 50 years - generates the most efficient executable code using a simple, easy syntax. I've mostly given up Fortran coding. My tools are now built in Matlab. But if I had to write a quick and dirty engineering program in native code, I'd still choose Fortran.
program main
implicit none
integer i
do 100 i=1,10
write (*,*) 'Hello, world!'
100 continue
write (*,*) 'Thanks, John.'
end program main
K-
When I took computer science for a semester as a senior in high school, the only formal computer training I have, the languages were Basic, Cobalt, and Fortran. They only taught us Basic. I never use it any more and I'm certainly too rusty at it to write any kind of program.