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Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

His discussion of Ada (not all upper case -- can the HN title be changed?) is interesting, but his criticism of Fortran, although colorful ("eldritch"?) , is vague and likely uninformed. I program in Fortran 95 a lot and can easily understand my code years later.

"Admittedly, I had pictured Ada’s syntax resembling the uncompromising verbosity and rigid construction of COBOL, or perhaps the Lovecraftian hieroglyphics of Fortran’s various eldritch incarnations."

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I enjoyed Fortran/FORTRAN. Is a nice succinct language.

"Lovecraftian hieroglyphics of Fortran" <-- the author never programmed in Perl, I presume.

"Lovecraftian hieroglyphics of Fortran" <-- the author never programmed in Perl, I presume.

The author might want to stay away from MUMPS for sanity's sake.

I very briefly encountered MUMPS in grad school and its eldritch horror has remained seared in my brain.

In true Cthulhu fashion, after encountering it at a medical facility where the lead programmer bragged about how amazing it was, I bought a book on the language. I like collecting language books (Icon was fun), but that was rather painful to read through and I have done IBM JCL and found it not unpleasant.

The NY Times a few summers ago wrote up some firm in Wisconsin that handles data-processing for quite a few insurance companies, using MUMPS. A co-worker's son a summer or so before had weighed competing internships from that firm and from a financial company in New York. I said I thought that the latter would offer more portable experience.

My wife used to work as a webdev at a shop that made its bread and butter contracting out some devs to do M/MUMPS development for a bank. Truly horrifying. The language/DB, but also that this thing was involved in handling people's money.

There are new projects done in MUMPS in finance all the time :|

s/Perl/APL/

APL puts the love in Lovecraftian.

> "Lovecraftian hieroglyphics of Fortran" <-- the author never programmed in Perl, I presume.

Or in Fortran, it's a relatively verbose language from what I remember of it (that said, I learned Fortran 90/95, so maybe the older variants were worse)

More likely the author was faced with numerical code in FORTRAN and confused large formulas with the language syntax being heavy in symbols.

Modern Fortran (2008/2018) syntax is a bliss. You would almost not notice if your are coding in MATLAB or Fortran with the advantage of your code being orders of magnitude faster in Fortran. Those who criticize the syntax of Fortran have probably not learned anything beyond F77, or at best F90.

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