Fortran Write Quotes

Seibel: I was looking at one of your papers from the 70s about your Fortran profiler. In the preamble you were very enthusiastic about how that tool changed your programming from figuring out what you were going to write, writing it, and debugging it, to figuring out what you were going to write, writing a really simple version, profiling it, then optimizing it.

Hopper’s insight spawned countless efforts at simplifying code writing. Probably the most important came from IBM which built a compiler called Formula Translation, or Fortran. It contained thirty-two instructions, such as PUNCH, READ DRUM and IF DIVIDE CHECK, which referred to the precise binary terms required by the computer. By the late 1950s, Fortran was hugely influential. “Now anyone with a logical mind and the desire could learn to program a computer,” one historian of computing has written. “You didn’t have to be a specialist, familiar with the inner workings of a computer and its demanding assembly language. By using Fortran’s simple repertoire of commands, you could make a computer do your bidding, and the compiler would automatically translate your instructions into efficient machine code.” While

I’ve programmed in all kinds of languages, said the tough old hacker as he eased up to the bar, and it don’t matter which you use... This is nonsense, of course. There is a world of difference between, say, Fortran I and the latest version of Perl or for that matter between early versions of Perl and the latest version of Perl. But the tough old hacker may himself believe what he’s saying. It’s possible to write the same primitive Pascal-like programs in almost every language. If you only ever eat at McDonald’s, it will seem that food is much the same in every country.

Programming is generally a manual operation—we laugh when someone asks us to “say something in FORTRAN.” It is a written language, and in spite of its resemblance to other written languages, it differs from them in not having a speech system behind it. Not that written languages are simple transcriptions of speech, not at all; but a written language such as English is strongly influenced by its relationship to a spoken language. This influence is not so strong in other written languages, such as those using the Chinese writing system, but the influence—the mutual influence —always exists.