Beautifully written but when the lack of a better compiler gets attributed to rational actions my brain glitched. That’s not fitting my mental model of how big corps operate at all!

Occam’s razor IBM didn’t invest in Fortran I because the internal political environment at the corporation didn’t have the incentives aligned to do so. This is completely orthogonal to whether they could have used a better compiler or not.

IBM has historically been heavily influenced by petty politics. Legacy programs like DOORS (an acquisition, but developed largely afterwards) continue to use UI patterns unlike any other Windows products, which I attribute to their legendary humiliations by Gates.

Letting pride outvote usability is an insane business decision.