Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Fri, 4 Oct 2024 20:13:27 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

A lot of what we do in programming/scripting is building one layer of
“abstract machine” on top of another, until we get to something
optimized for solving our particular problem.

True, but many people using a high level abstraction like Python think of
it as some sort of magic without realizing it's some poor old turtle
slaving away one opcode at a time. (Okay, so it's a team of turtles these
days).

My FORTRAN IV course started with an examination of the System 360
architecture before getting to the first FORTRAN statement. I'm not sure
that happens anymore.

Some of the people I worked with who were in their 40s or 50s had a course
using the 68HC11 microcontroller at UM but that was later dropped from the
curriculum in favor of abstraction. The last I knew Java was the didactic
language of choice for the CS people there.