If that’s the case I’m surprised that VB.net is more popular than VB6. And VBA is never even mentioned even though that is probably still used more than both of them for MS Office automation.
I think the sole reason MS created VB.net was just to entice developers to stop using VB6. I made the jump to it myself and quickly realized it was a trick and that VB.net had way more in common with C# and shared only the name and syntax with VB, and no actual VB knowledge or experience carried over. From there, after a brief stumble into the world of Java, I switched over to Python instead and never looked back.
I work at the radio telescope where FORTH was created - the 36 foot (now 12 meter() on Kitt Peak. We no longer use it there.
I also did a lot of FORTH programming in the eighties. The bigger the project, the worse things got. It was just not suited to much beyond simple real-time control.
I started on Fortran as a physics undergrad, and was told by my advisor not to bother with the new fangled 91 nonsense, Fortran 77 was the gold standard.
It’s not your father’s Fortran77, most of which looks like obfuscated code due to 6 character identifiers and upper case. Nobody uses that shit today unless they’re paid to or are graduate students. I consider maintaining F77 (and earlier) a form of self harm.
From F95 on, the latest of the Fortrans allow common modern syntactic constructions and even have clever list comprehensions within array indices.
At this late stage, some legacy code products have been translated into a modern Fortran dialect. Commercial computational chemistry projects come to mind, e.g., MoPac.
Addendum: for an overview of the language’s evolution, read Wikipedia’s second para on Fortran.
I’ve been through the Fortran, Pascal and C versions of these books, the first two in-depth and they are pretty much verbatim translations of the algorithms into each language ‘as is’, with no use of idiomatic principles, for example in the case of C: types, heap allocation, macros or bounds-checking. (I know that there will be some on this thread who say that you don’t need those constructs…)
On the plus side, you can just buy one and you’re done!
I should also say that the algorithms themselves are solid, if not always maximally efficient with memory.
I learned FORTRAN as an undergrad, and used it extensively as a grad student. And then after college, I wrote a program in Visual Basic (the first version, which was actually DOS based and not Windows), and the company I wrote that for was still distributing it to their field sales people as recently as the early 2000s. Hopefully they finally stopped. I was embarrassed that was still in use by then.
I had a job in the '80s where we had a card reader and page printer, along with Decwriters. The page printer got used maybe once a month, the card reader, absolutely never. At some idle moments I would look admiringly at the card reader with the knowledge that mechanical marvel it was, it would sit there for ten years and then be tossed into a scrap bin.
I wrote my first programs in the sixties with one of these. You had twelve buttons, one for each row on the card. The bottom 9 buttons were divided into 4 sectors. The top two buttons (or the absence of a button) gave you which sector on the lower 9 you were using. The machine I used had the keys divided up by 45-degree lines, so this is not quite the same model, but it is similar.
I learned on Algol 1900. I came to Fortran 4 later.
Clay tablets, eh? We used to dream of clay tablets. We used these and were grateful.
My first computing science class was Algol, but the instructor was irked to learn that many of us in the class had already been exposed to FORTRAN through physics (this was the 1970s so a ‘clean slate’ was the usual case for new students) Apparently FORTRAN ruins you forever if it’s “your first”
I was forced to learn FORTRAN 77 in 90 or 91 as part of a freshman general engineering class absolutely every engineering student was required to take. Didn’t matter if your future career was going to designing cardboard boxes or blowing up buildings, FORTRAN!
I can write in many computer languages, but I fear I am always writing ‘C’. I came to ‘C’ from FORTRAN 4 in 1985 (still first edition K&R). C had a lot of the auto-increment and address operations that the PDP-11 set had, and it separated the I/O operations from the language into a separate stdio library. It also had a garanteed minimum signed 16-bit precision level for integers. I liked machine code, and ‘C’ was half-way there.
As a firmware engineer designing systems for a cloud computing company, yes. If you write a piece of code in C that adds 1/2 a second to boot time as opposed to assembly, you had better have a good reason for it to be in C.
Personally, I like assembly because hex makes sense to me.
And Androgyny Day just keeps on BRINGING IT! Did you need a language to guarantee ungainlinesses while somehow forcing all lines to 43-82 characters? Can you see the NSF form for proving your work can’t be done with a single 5-input transistor device and an instrumentation amplifier in your sleep? Well, chum! Get out of the stacks and into optical* carding!
*No such thing as an optical device with a whole month of life to it, sorry [Narrator: This would recur later in lifetimes for duplex ADF scanner lids.]
I had never seen Fortran, mostly just Pascal/Basic and PL/1 (on punched card)
Was working at computing center, boss had me rewrite some Prime monitoring software that wasn’t compatible with either the current PrimeOS or his spiffy 9600 baud color serial terminal.
The next time I was asked to write code in Fortran was some code for a nuclear reactor. I passed on that one.
