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... and everything old is new again.

The solution, which (unsurprisingly, works!) is how you did stuff in Fortran-77, APL (circa 1958). There were no iterators, so all you did was pass around one big array that contained all the data, and indices into it.

In a couple of years, they will realize that even structs are inefficient, and will go to parallel arrays - at which case the transition to Fortran/APL/J/K would be complete.

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I always like reading about how people did things back when dinosaurs ruled the data center. Do you know of any web pages that detail this sort of thing?

No, unfortunately.

I'm close to 40, dinosaurish by HN/Reddit standards, but I learned Fortran mostly because back in the late 80s and early 90s essentially all numeric processing code was written either in Assembly or Fortran; and at a later stage, because I was the only one proficient in Fortran, I inherited lots of legacy code at work.

Most people my age, even if they've been programming since age 9, haven't seen any Fortran unless they're doing physics or using LAPACK.

As a 20something who has been unfortunately intimate with Fortran, I can see why people in the past would have been fanatical about C, and heck even talked about the virtues of diving into assembly rather than deal with Fortran.

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