Re: The joy of FORTRAN

rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

On Fri, 27 Sep 2024 23:30:46 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>

Back in the days when BASIC was considered “advanced” ...

>
I don't think Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code was ever
considered 'advanced'.
>
“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that
have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are
mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
― Edsger Dijkstra
>
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1013817.Edsger_W_Dijkstra

:-(

I got my start in high school with BASIC, keyed into a teletype and saved
to paper tape.  (Later, I learned how to toggle code into the front panel of
the PDP-8.)

He thought highly of COBOL too.
>
“The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be
regarded as a criminal offense.”
>
We had a RS6000 machine named 'djikstra' (sic). It was probably named by
the director of engineering. His personal Linux box was 'warfrat'. You
learn about regular expressions when search code created by a person who
couldn't spell for sour owl shit.

Heh heh, the sigmonster is eavesdropping:

--
Various documentation updates and bugfixes (the best way to know that a
stable kernel is approaching is to notice that somebody starts to
spellcheck the kernel - it has so far never failed)
-- Linus Torvalds in the annoucement for pre-2.1.99-3