John Backus, who led the team that invented FORTRAN, has passed away. In a testimony to the staying power of FORTRAN, when I was doing an undergraduate research project in astrophysics in 1995, most of the code I delt with was written in FORTRAN.
O brave new quantum world!
That’s sad news. I feel bad now for bagging Scott earlier today for still using BASIC.
The first language I learned was BASIC. Actually I learned to debug before I learned to program. We used to take the programs that were written in the back of computer magazines and type them into my TRS-80 Color Computer. Of course you would make mistakes when you typed the programs in. So you’d have to figure out where you made a mistake. Understanding how the program was working made this task much simpler. So I guess I’d say I learned to debug BASIC and then to program BASIC first. I think the next language I learned was probably assembly langauge on an APPLE (by entering the hex values into the memory locations) and then probably PASCAL. I don’t really miss BASIC much, but I still miss PASCAL which I haven’t coded in years.
Actually scratch that. The first language I learned was LOGO! Back in second grade. I’d totally forgotten about that!
FORWARD 100
LEFT 90
FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 20
Ah, good times.
See, I’m younger than you. My first language was MATLAB. BASIC was about my third or fourth…
Crap. I forgot about LOGO. It was so cool, I could make that little blinking triangle move like crazy.
Fortran was a huge step forward at the time. A pity it soon turned into a millstone. Given everything else he did (such as BNF), I can more than forgive that.
Yo. Wasn’t logo was a turtle?
I remember trying to write a game in BASIC on my C64, but I gave up after a few hours and played Petch. Fifteen years later I tried to learn FORTRAN in an undergraduate computational physics subject, but I gave up for a few hours and played Petch. Now I just write in C.
Good lord. I still have my Fortran book from college – almost entirely Fortran-77 with this added chapter on the “new” Fortran-90. Then I spent time programming in Fortran-77 while at the National Weather Service in the late 90’s. All the code for the AWIPS package was in Fortran and C. But my first language was BASIC which I used to make computerized Choose Your Own Adventures on my TI 99-4A (which I think I still have somewhere, collecting dust along with my old Atari).
Mr Magoo INVENTED FORTRAN???!?!?!?!!
🙂
LOGO! Damn, I’m old…
Like a man I think Grace Hoppper just spun a bit in her grave 🙂
For a long time, as Stan Kelly-Bootle put it, FORTRAN had the one feature no other language had: working code. “As ugly as sin and as portable as syphilis.”
I learned programming with FORTRAN on punched cards fed into an IBM 360. Like a man.
I just had the sudden realization that my old TI 99-4A was the world’s first 16-bit personal (home) computer. I mean not mine specifically, but the TI 99-4A as a model. Jeez. Maybe I should run out and buy myself one of these D-Wave things and then I can boast having once owned the first 16-bit PC and the first 16-qubit QC. Oh, darn it, none of my local retailers carry D-Wave. Oh well.