ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) (12/05/90)
Why does this debate dominate comp.lang.fortran??
In any such situation, there are bound to be people who're
comfortable with an old technology and there are others who find
the gains of switching to be worth the costs of transition.
Religious wars aren't too useful to anyone concerned.
Consider a close relative of Fortran on this front: Cobol.
Nobody seriously thinks Cobol is a "good" language. Nobody
fights religious wars on it: I've seen people who would argue
for Cobol and I just ignore them.
There are people who have to manage old code or face a MIS
division filled with Cobol programmers who have to write Cobol,
they go ahead and write Cobol. Younger folk who have the opportunity
to make their choices with more freedom rarely touch Cobol
(show me a bright kid leaving college today who's actually
enthusiastic about Fortran).
Like Cobol and the 8088, there are sound commercial reasons why
Fortran is important, and why it's going to take a while to fade
away. To paraphrase Einstein, when people who're in Graduate
school today are in their 40s and 50s, there will be very little
Fortran in the world. Because top-notch people in the professional
world today got their Ph. D.s in the middle ages, they'll
definitely use Fortran. Why bother arguing about it??
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Ajay Shah, (213)734-3930, ajayshah@usc.edu
The more things change, the more they stay insane.
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