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Subject: 
Re: learning languages (was: Re: Perl rules!)
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.off-topic.geek
Date: 
Tue, 13 Jul 1999 22:13:06 GMT
Reply-To: 
jsproat@io.[stopspam]com
Viewed: 
1204 times
  
Todd Lehman wrote:
Different camps, right?  In a nutshell, FORTRAN was/is for math and physics
geeks, while COBOL was/is for suits.  (Or:  FORTRAN is for number crunching
and COBOL is for business record data manipulation.)

Oy vey, der camps.  I alvays vorget der camps.  Und der suits und der
schlide-rules and der schtuff.

Also:  FORTRAN (begun in 1954, first reference manual published in 1956,
and first production version released in 1957) was an IBM project.  COBOL
(begun in 1955, released in 1959) was largely a US Navy project, and also
somewhat an effort to demonstrate that computers didn't have to be used
only for number-crunching.

Wasn't COBOL started in 1959?  By the time COBOL was developed, my dad (1)
was writing FORTRAN compilers for whatever platform he needed one on.  Or,
so the legend goes...

and can you imagine the Navy licensing a language from IBM when they could
make their own?  :-)

Well, they wouldn't cater to the English language, so they came up with
their own.  :-,

Cheers,
- jsproat

1.  AHA!  The source of my pro-FORTRAN biases!  :-P

--
Jeremy H. Sproat <jsproat@io.com>
http://www.io.com/~jsproat
Darth Maul Lives



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: learning languages (was: Re: Perl rules!)
 
(...) I think that's when it was first released, right? Hopper began working on it much earlier than that, yes? 1955 was what I read somewhere a couple hours ago. (...) Hey cool -- so you're a second-gen too? We'll have to invent a secret handshake. (...) (25 years ago, 13-Jul-99, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
  Re: learning languages (was: Re: Perl rules!)
 
(...) Heh heh heh. What was your parental-unit (1) coding? My dad was basically a civvie contractor for the Army for a good chunk of his career, writing software for calibrating RADAR and RADOT hardware, though he did work at the Hanford Nuclear (...) (25 years ago, 14-Jul-99, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: learning languages (was: Re: Perl rules!)
 
(...) Well, hey, aren't we all -- and as well we should all be (IMHO) in 1999, especially with all this Double-Byte COBOL, OO-COBOL, and COBOL-Java stuff going on as perverse attempts to keep COBOL alive and milking the Y2K cash cow. But I thought (...) (25 years ago, 13-Jul-99, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)

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