Mostly very enjoyable and a constant learning curve. Obviously there have been some major improvements down the years and I'd choose 'IF-THEN-ELSE' statements and state-of-the art character-string handling as the two greatest game-changers.įor about the last 15 years before retirement I was working exclusively on the migration of mainframe legacy programs onto PC, using a mix of Fortran, Visual Basic and Excel or Access VBA. So Why Fortran?įor me and millions of other Fortran users world-wide since the mid-1960's, the great appeals are simplicity and transparency – you don't have to get your head round sophisticated programming concepts before you get started, you don't need to know a great many tricks of the trade, and what you see is what you get – there aren't a whole lot of special tricks going on behind the curtain.Īnd if you want to implement mathematical algorithms that's just fine – it does what it says on the box: ' Formula Translation'. Despite confident predictions over the past few decades of its imminent demise, Fortran is still with us, and my money is on Fortran to last for another quarter-century at the very least. So there's no apparent rhyme or reason as to why some languages succumb whilst others flourish. But it was widely used (and maybe still is in its new guise of VB.NET).
Undocumented side-effects between various features led frequently to undiagnosable run-time errors, fury and waste of time. Even then its bizarre flakiness could lead programmers such as myself to despair. It was no good for scientific, engineering or commercial applications, and was only really suited for interfacing other applications. It was entirely inadequate for anything remotely mission-critical. Visual Basic, the apparent successor to COBOL on the PC, was only fit for the most trivial and relatively menial applications.
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What an enormous shame that no mainstream software providers took up the challenge of producing a true PC Cobol, a Visual Cobol to which mainframe COBOL applications could have been migrated cleanly. My one-time employers spent a fortune in the late 1970's and early 80's developing a version that would sit comfortably on desk-top computers of any kind, but were overtaken by the IBM PC and very nearly went to the wall. Its data-structured architecture was unsurpassed by any other language that I encountered. It was all too easy to write the most appalling programs, incomprehensible even to their authors after a few months had elapsed (reminding us of the poet Browning who when asked the meaning of a particular passage of verse said that when he had written it, both he and God knew its meaning, but by now only God knew). This is not to claim that COBOL (or Fortran, for that matter) were by any means perfect. Their principal attraction was to DP managers hoping to make their programming staff redundant. Look at ADA, Algol, Pascal, PL1 – highly-sophisticated languages that were once expected to carry all before them: one is tempted to say they've come, they've gone, but some of them are admittedly still around – nevertheless they are hardly household names any longer.Īnd report generators were supposed to make commercial programming languages obsolete, but they were Procrustean beds into which every system specification had to be tortured by lopping or stretching, hammers looking for a nail. The upper-case of COBOL indicates that it hasn't and isn't. The lower-case of Fortran in the first link indicates that Fortran has made the cut, and is still with us. (In the same vein, we can reflect that the epochal IBM 360 and Cray operating systems were conceived by lone geniuses, Gene Amdahl and the eponymous Seymour the Tunnel Digger respectively.) Fortran and Cobol – no accident that they were the brain-children of 'single parents', creative individuals (John Backus and Grace Hopper respectively) rather than committees or project design teams.
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