Fortran II was my first programming language, and a key element to my first summer job, and to my first FTJ. There were a lot of things about it that eventually made me dissatisfied enough that I studied compilers to see why there were such goofy restrictions, dabbling in XPL. I haven't been back, but germane to this article, I visited with my professor with whom I had the summer job 40 years later, and he pulled out the code that I had written that was still in production, It had been changed a bit, but it was still very recognizable. And it survived because, while it was a small part of a very large numerical analysis project, it worked.

The article makes me wonder if I had a problem of this sort again, would I choose Fortran. I'm thinking not, but then again, there are hints that the language has changed significantly over the last 50 years.

I have used many other languages during that time, and am fond of several of them (bliss 36, lisp, various assembler) and dislike others (RPG III, COBOL, perl). Python would be in the middle.