Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I have written one FORTRAN program in my entire life, back in 1991 when my first job included supporting a PRIME minicomputer. When we got a Solaris server later that year the terminal I used was only line oriented so I couldn't use vi and learned ed instead. I only started learning vi properly a few years ago. Old habits die really hard.

One of the scientific staff ran environmental simulations written in FORTRAN that took a week to run. When he ported it to SunOS it speeded up massively, so he just dialed up the detail level of the simulation so it still took a week. As of a few years ago they still used that simulation, and may still do so. I don't know how long it takes to run now though.

I, being one of the precise brats with trash-80s mentioned, bumped into it in 84-86 era. Fortran and pascal were, to me, options to basic and all three were somewhat ok, perfectly understandable and no use whatsoever since they were much to slow to do anything remotely cool on our tiny boxes. In high school four years down the line, I bumped into it again, trying to rewrite old fortran code in C and bumping into stuff written in pascal off and on, sometimes being pressured to write in Pascal. Again, we (true to our bratty nature) had no concept of what all the old timers were bickering about - unless you used C or assembler to get close to the metal, who cares? Write in Modula2, Perl, Basic, Lisp, ML, Smurf.. whatever. Once you're not using what the machine uses, pick your poison - it's of little concern to us, though sure, we'll write in it and read it it you'd like. Took another decade before I saw that there was some actual merit to debating what language to use since it influences the style quite a lot, but I still think it's perhaps given a little more credit than it is due.

I have an Atari Portfolio with its own onboard C compiler, Turbo C 2.0, still fully functional and working, all my old little proggies still there, gonna give it to my boys one of these days, hopefully it'll survive a while longer..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com