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Date:      Thu, 17 Dec 1998 19:33:18 -0600
From:      David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net>
To:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Fortran in the base system (was Re: sysinstall) 
Message-ID:  <199812180133.TAA02439@n4hhe.ampr.org>
In-Reply-To: Message from "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com>  of "Wed, 16 Dec 1998 17:24:39 PST." <50369.913857879@zippy.cdrom.com> 

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"Jordan K. Hubbard" writes:
> > I don't know of *ANY* University that teaches Fortran to Comp. Sci
> > students.  Fortran is a dead language, and is only used by engineers
> > that have already existing Fortran code.
> 
> I can name at least 4, and they're all major universities.
> 
> The death of fortran has been predicted and, in several cases,
> announced since 1965.

Recently at work in the planning stages of a new computing center The
Bosses tried to shoot me down for including Fortran on their wonderful
new State-Of-The-Art systems. My justification (I hate working in
Fortran. I hate it when users come to me wanting to know why their
Fortran data files are being overwritten with 256 nulls) was another 
question, "How many of your analysts are over 30 years old?"

Fortran was left in the proposal.

The sad thing is these same analysts are "training" the new guys in the
same bad old habits. They have models which they trust, coded in
Fortran. Fortunately most have been weaned off VMS onto Unix and loath 
changing again to NT. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. But am 
happier to support Fortran under Unix than anything under NT.


--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@nospam.hiwaay.net
=====================================================================
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its
capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.



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