John Backus, who invented the FORTRAN language, has died at age 82.
This news will be of interest to old mainframe-heads, and to nobody else at all.
I must say, I never warmed to FORTRAN. It had a sort of angular clunkiness about it that was apparent even in the 1960s. That FORMAT statement–hoo-ee!
The inherent inefficiency of any high-level language in any case grated on my pure-math sensibilities. I was an Assembler guy at heart, “coding down to the metal.”
Nobody does that any more, and computers are just boring now, like cars. I increasingly find I have to drag myself to the keyboard nowadays. Boy, was it exciting at the time, though!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!