Fortran

I learned Fortran at the Universidad de Chile, as a freshman. The course was normally taught with Ratfor, and the following year they switched to Pascal, but I, for reasons I can’t remember, ended up with Fortran.

Used to programming in Basic, I didn’t find it hard to learn this venerable programming language. Today I read a write-up that actually shows a Fortran far more modern than the one I got, Watfor-77.

Fortran is now turning 50, in the same year that its creator, John Backus, passed away.

Backus also invented Backus-Naur form, the notation used to describe formal languages, programming languages in particular.

I don’t know how many programmers can say they have invented their own programming language, but I have invented several, and in the 90s, together with Marco Zúñiga, we got as far as selling licenses and teaching courses for a small programming language, invented by him and later expanded by me. It was called Sanscript.

We worked with this language for at least 2 years, on various telecommunications projects, and it had modest success in the local industry. It had its own virtual machine, and it would be what people today call a domain-specific language (DSL).

There was some Fortran in that mini language, so it may well be that without Fortran there would have been no Sanscript, and no memorable moment in my life either.