FORTRAN

Donald Sensing over at One Hand Clapping is an ex-FORTRAN guy. Who knew? My parents are both FORTRAN folks as well. My dad met my mom because she was a punch card girl at Pratt & Whitney where he was an engineer. So in a way I wouldn't be here if not for FORTRAN. It also got me my current job with the Army because I could deal with the metric ton of old FORTRAN code lying around.

I have a warm spot in my heart for FORTRAN programming, mostly because it is significantly more difficult to screw up than C or C++. Plus it is a lot easier for a compiler to optimize FORTRAN than C. The language is more structured and it pays off. Unfortunately some of the free fortran compilers aren't fortran compilers at all. For instance I use G77 a lot at work, but G77 is basically the GCC compiler with some translation code stuck on the front end. So its a C compiler and the runtimes show it. Ah well.