[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Steve Simon]

again, a personal view,

i think fortran 66 was not a great language but by the time 77 came around it was good enough (especially with rat4 in front)

the problem fortran had was its position in time, in the early days of computer programming the authors of some large systems tended to be experts in their fields, but not always good programmers.

in previous jobs i supported both Pafec FE and Flow3d. both of these started out as well structured systems but where amended by many hackers.

fortran gets the blame for this because fortran was what people used then, but its not the languages fault.

-Steve