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A light news piece that discusses some of the people involved in the development of FORTRAN (NYTimes requires free registration). A discussion on /. took place last week for those willing to wade and pick up a few nuggets.
It is interesting that three of the original computer languages - FORTRAN, COBOL, and Lisp - still are used to this day. Only recently has it been possible to match the speed for some of the scientific libraries that do heavy number crunching.
It's also interesting that there is still an active committment to extend Fortran. See Fortran 200x for specs of the next version. Guess after they get OOP, they'll have to turn around with another version that incorporates Generics. :-)
Posted to general by Chris Rathman on 6/17/01; 7:36:17 PM
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Pioneers of the FORTRAN Programming Language
