IBM 610 workstation computer 3368

That's true as far as it goes.

Whatever has to be used to get the job done well is

Cracks start appearing here. Choice of language is the result of many considerations. Among them are some that should be rejected: -management fiat -blind prejudice some that may be unfortunately decisive: -what the available people already know some that are quite valid -existence of good library code and some that relate to the qualities of the language itself. (I resist the temptation to set out principles on which languages should be judged, but one should be concerned about expressive power, efficiency of code writing, mechanisms for catching errors in the development environment, and maintainability.

There has been a disturbing anti-FORTRAN snobbery

Anti -Fortran and -Cobol sentiment goes back far longer than that. It started with machine-language and buttembly-language programmers who heard claims, readily believed by managers, that HLLs would remove the need for their specialist skills. (It's like English, they said. Non-techinical people will be able to write their own programs.)

John Backus, who did wonderful work in the 50's leading the development of Fortran and the first compiler, had decided by the 70's that if they had known 20 years previously what they knew now, they would have defined a different language entirely. Hence his Turing award paper on FP. But it was already too late. The culture of Fortran was established. Of course, the language has evolved, although compiler development has lagged somewhat, but the result is still an old language with flashier concrete syntax.

Cobol was well suited to some business applications, but its advantage has evaporated as better tools have appeared for the things it did well. It was OK as a way of interfacing with certain kinds of data, and for I-O formatting, but the part of the language that actually computes things is crude.

And there's nothing wrong with scripting languages. Most new code written these days is glue, and for that you just don't need anything more sophisticated.

--brian

-- Wellington, New Zealand

"What's life? Life's easy. A quirk of matter. Nature's way of keeping meat fresh."