Re: The joy of FORTRAN

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

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.