This thread really puzzles me. Fortran should be discarded to the dustbin of history for no more reason than indexing from 1. The love for it feels like the whole vinyl vs digital thing.
Also, that list seems very suspicious. The fact that VB is on it should raise anyone’s eyebrows.
Drivers?
September, 1975. Central Michigan University. Two weeks earlier, I thought the word “software” was something my dumbass roommate made up to mess with me. Now, it’s 2:00 am and I’m standing in the computer lab (as a freshman, we had zero priority in the lab so the only way we got time on the key punch or compilers was to bribe the janitor to let us in after the lab shut down) staring at about a bazillion cards I’d just punched out, trying to find the mistake that’s preventing me from making the dot matrix printer spit out an image of Farrah Fawcett made up entirely of X’s and O’s. Good times, good times.
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Hm.
#12 Delphi/Object Pascal
Seems legit.
I still keep a small 30 card deck as a souvenir from my student days. It’s a Fortran routine that solves a mechanical four bar linkage.
If you find the exact model, give us a hollerith.
No OOK! or even Malboge on that list? That can’t be right!
If you look for sanity what are you doing in a programming class?
Loosely related:
FORTH : a wonderful language, but write only code unless you included as much comment as code. I could come back to a really clear and transparent Fourth routine the following day, and it had miraculously turned to gibberish. But the interpreter can be tiny.
VBA is probably there under VB Script.
VB6 is fading slowly away. Microsoft ended official support years ago. It’s still hanging on in some places. We still have a bunch of legacy VB6 code. It still works fine, so it’s hard to make a business case to rewrite it in a more modern language. I look at it as job security for me, since I’m one of the few left from the Olden Times that still knows it.
VB.Net is an abomination that should never have seen the light of day. When MS announced .NET, they initially didn’t have a VB alternative. VB6 was (I think) the most popular language on the planet at the time, so there was a tremendous amount of pushback. They quickly cobbled something together, but as you said, it really is just C# with a VB-like syntax. You can’t just load a VB6 project in, make a few changes, and recompile. You need to do a complete rewrite. Which completely misses the whole point, because if you are going to do a rewrite, you might as well do it in C#.
The sentimental programmer’s lament:
Most people don’t realise, but FORTRAN was invented before zero. Early computers had no zero state, instead using 1 and 2. Hence FORTRAN, lacking modern luxuries available in C, indexes from zero.
More seriously, if you want to crunch numbers fast, it’s hard to beat Fortran. If you want to do anything else, probably steer clear of it. I find f2py pretty close to optimal for numerics and interaction with the outside world.
It’s not like fast number crunching is somehow uniquely possible with Fortran. If you really want fast number crunching, go Cuda/OpenCL on GPU. If you want properly optimised code on CPU you’re going to be writing with CPU intrinsics.
For sure, C etc don’t have many optimisations benefiting from no aliasing, but with the recent move to LLVM 12, Rust is spitting distance from turning on noalias by default on stable. That would remove the last notional performance advantage Fortran has over other languages.
In university, we had one with +0 and -0!
Why not just tell it where you want to start?
array[0..100] of integer;
array[10..20] of float;
Some of these advantages have been addressed in the latest revisions of C/C++.
You can,. for instance, abuse C++ templates in all sorts of wonderful ways to eek out numeric efficiency.
Hey, maybe you can tell me if there were any female FORTH programmers. I was one and I never met any others (although I changed careers in the 90s).
My first programming language was Fortran. We learned it (with, yes, punched cards in 1976) in an Intro to Computers class. I was just down the hill from you at U of A. We mostly learned a lot of history; coding was such a small part of the class that our big accomplishment at the end of the semester was to write a DO loop!
I began to call it Fo’tran after my funnest typo, a FOMAT statement. I still can’t say the name right.
And because everything is about me, here’s more detail. I took that class just down the hill from you, nixiebunny, at the U of A. I was intrigued and I was getting tired of my major (anthropology), but I went off as planned to do summer school elsewhere. There I met a couple of CS majors, cemented my decision to get a second bachelors in CS, and became one of two women studying it at the U of Iowa.
Oh, and those CS majors I met? Fell in love with one of them. My mother’s holiday letter said that I had “moved to Iowa to pursue her interest in computer science” (and I don’t think she ever saw the double meaning).
Aforesaid CS major and I are still married 42 years later, and he still works in software (and to bring it back to antique languages, I’ll note that he works in Smalltalk).
When there’s not a virus pandemic, I share an office with* a team that uses & maintains a tool written in Fortran. I guess it was originally written that way, and the person in charge of it all just keeps updating the code rather than re-write in something newer. We’re down in the basement, kind of like Milton**, so I’m curious to see what happens when Bill tells Mitlon “we’re gonna need you put that tool in The Cloud.”
*(but am not otherwise part of)
**(although we’ve at least got a window)
My mom used to do that for an insurance company, back when LBJ was president.
Standard floating point implementations still have negative and positive zeroes. They’re usually equal if you compare them, even though their binary representations are different.
