John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies

The New York Times ^ | March 20, 2007 | STEVE LOHR

[Erasmus]

Hmm. Pretty sure we had them in FORGO on the IBM 1620 in 1963.

[the OlLine Rebel]

I loved FORTRAN!



"With some training, they were no longer dependent on a programming priesthood to translate their science and engineering problems"

UhOh, imagine all the screaming and crying over losing their jobs due to better technology....

(oh, wait, they're only "professionals", so their jobs don't matter.)

But anyway, on with the Luddites!

[the OlLine Rebel]

You can probably find some on eBay.

[RSmithOpt]

I've got mine laying on my desk here at work. Anyone working here >40 has no idea what it is or how it works. LMAO!!

I hand to co-workers from time to time when they asked to borrow a calculator.

[PA Engineer]

My first computer language. Sniff. RIP.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

oh for the simple days of Fortran, JCL, and punch cards.

That's Hollerith cards, buster. Try explaining to a twenty something why Two Line orbital Elements (TLE's) are on two lines of ascii.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

oh for the simple days of Fortran, JCL, and punch cards.

That's Hollerith cards, buster. Try explaining to a twenty something why Two Line orbital Elements (TLE's) are on two lines of ascii.

[Jhensy]

My sophomore year in college (1981) everybody said you should take a computer course, so I took Fortran/Cobol.

I had zero experience with any computers beforehand, and the entire semester I did not understand a single thing. Nothing.

I must have missed a class early on or something, but it was never explained to me properly what we were doing, what all this code writing was, or even what code IS. I just kept on following the instructions in the book step-by-step, and somehow passed the course.

I still have no idea how that happened. It was like passing an English course when you don't know the language.

[mikrofon]

[capt. norm]

So you liked COBOL?

Heaven forbid. I remember, in the 80's,writing COBOL's verbose code by the mile...oh what fun!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

See post #69.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Nice Graphic.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The Departure of one of the pioneers.....

[torquinus]

Another Xerox funny, at least on the Sigma Fortran compiler...

always got a compiler warning as follows:

GOTO JAIL
^^^^ WARNING: GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL, DO NOT PASS GO...

[Publius]

Fortran was my first language, but I wrote Cobol code for 31 years before retiring in '05.

[Marine_Uncle]

Amen to that.

[AFPhys]

That wasn't 8K of "memory"...

That was 8K of "core"

[AFPhys]

We still use Fortran at our lab here... Fortran will never fade from importance as the first successful high level computer language... and it is still very good for speed and maintainability.

F77 and F90 are much better iterations than what many of us old-timers learned on: Fortran IV. Though it is still possible to write terribly threaded code, it is easy to avoid that.

I suspect there will be many Fortran programs still being used even 20 years from now.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The number of lines of Fortran code just in the National Labs is in the Millions....

[AFPhys]

Ah, yes... punch cards... Fortran ... WatFor... CUPL... JCL... ASM...

MY favorite use for punch cards actually wasn't using the cards themselves, though.

We would empty bins-full of the punches before going to our friends' weddings. We would throw a snowball-sized handful of punches, instead of rice. That would travel through the air and look alot like a comet ... virtually exploding on contact with the bride or groom... I got quite a few good "hits" with them. Until I married and was on the receiving end, I didn't realize there actually was some force behind the impact, though. LOL.

Great fun. I really wish they were still available for that purpose!

Big mess ... but being paper they were "natural" ... LOL