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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.COMstopspammers
Viewed: 
2715 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. (...) (27 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 (...) (27 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 (...) (27 years ago, 13-Jul-99, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)

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