On 2/05/2024 8:17 pm, Stephen Loosley wrote:
Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in
computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny
and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly
developed BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming
language on the college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe.
Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing
and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades.
God I feel old sometimes, but then...
I've seen some terrible programming efforts by "democratized" programmers (even
professional engineers back then) who seemed stuck in the step-by-step computing process,
apparently unable to abstract it even to the level of indexed loops, variables which
could cause divide-by-zero or overflow exceptions, and generalised subroutines.
It's not entirely a 1960's or 1980's issue either. I've noticed some 21st-century
software-engineering students seem to have trouble grasping the concept of
object-oriented programming. Supposedly OO software sometimes include some form of
"control program" which effectively duplicates functions performed by the OO
language, but badly.
Interestingly, Fortran IV seems to have evolved as a modern language, perhaps because
of its wide use in areas such as weather modelling. It's fully parallel, supports OO
programming, etc. The latest version is Fortran 2023 (try telling that to a SWE class
:-) - see https://fortran-lang.org/ <https://fortran-lang.org/> - and I think
most Linux distributions include an earlier version.
One wonders what DIY AI will bring...
_David Lochrin_
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