> What’s happened, of course, with FORTRAN is that it has become the lingua franca of the computing world. It is the one language that everybody understands to some level of detail — it is on every computer, in every country, made by every manufacturer — and one could learn to use FORTRAN reading books at every level of complexity, written in every language on the surface of the earth. It is universal, like the air we breathe, and I don’t think it’s going to be displaced for a long time to come.

"I met a traveler from an antique land..."

▲ lokedhs 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

To be fair, most languages in use today are just FORTRAN with diffrent syntax.

Both Lisp and array language programmers are sadly somewhat rare.

▲ noosphr 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Fortran's genesis is quite different from the algol family of languages which is what everyone uses today. This is why numerical computation always feels a bit off compared to the host language, be is numpy or GSL.

▲ BoingBoomTschak an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

  > What Made Lisp Different:
  > 1. Conditionals (if-then-else construct)
  > 2. A function type (functions as first class objects)
  > 3. Recursion
  > 4. A new concept of variables (dynamic typing and pass-by-pointer)
  > 5. Garbage-collection

https://paulgraham.com/diff.html

Looks like most modern languages have more in common with Lisp than FORTRAN, besides the syntax.

	▲	lokedhs an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That list is incomplete. Those are things that Lisp invented but is now commonplace. What it also invented but rather few languages also support is the capability of metaprogramming, being able to treat code as data.

▲ elch 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

(1978)