On Fri, 30 Oct 2015, Chuck Guzis wrote:
I think the demise of FORTRAN is overstated. That there is an X3 group still
advancing the language attests to that. While FORTRAN may be a 60-year old
language, Fortran is not.
Which one is NASA looking for? FORTRAN/Fortran in general, or expertise
with the variants from half a century ago?
As far as assembly, I don't believe that it's a dead language. When you need
simple, rugged, low-power hardware, it's still a very good way to go.
The rumors of its demise have been around for a long time.
2 or 3 decades ago, the folk controlling lower division undergraduate
"Computer Science" at UC (pronounced "UCK") Berkeley, Clancy and Harvey,
declared, "Assembly language is dead! Nobody will ever program in it
again.", and shifted their program to Scheme/Lisp. They also
discontinued any beginning courses in C, claiming that anybody entering
college for Computer Science should/would "already know C".
That increased UC Berkeley student enrollment in the C classes that I
taught at Merritt College (Peralta Community College District), and our
Fortram classes got a lot of UC Berkeley students who had Fortran as a
degree requirement in various science departments.
Philippe Kahn said, about his "Turbo-Assembler", that "Assembly language
is not for programming; it is for debugging".
I have to admit that assembly language may no longer be a great career
path, but there will always be need for some levels of hand optimization.
Note: I realize that some may feel a need to differentiate between machine
language programming and assembly language programming. I acknowledge
the difference, but feel that in this context they can be lumped together.
It is always amusing how desperate some peop[le seem to be to declare the
demise of any systems that they aren't involved in.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred [email protected]
