Fortran Quotes

Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days. ~ Marvin Minsky

If you give someone Fortran, he has Fortran. If you give someone Lisp, he has any language he pleases ~ Guy Steele

Betty Snyder, who, under her married name, Betty Holberton, went on to become a pioneer programmer who helped develop the COBOL and Fortran languages, ~ Walter Isaacson

FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there. ~ Ken Thompson

I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran. ~ Tony Hoare

In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

I was impressed by the scene in Apollo 13 where the astronauts request confirmation of their calculations and several people at Mission Control dive for their slide rules. For several months after that, my standard response to statements like "We must implement multi-processor object-oriented Java-based client-server technologies immediately!" was "You know, FORTRAN and slide rules put men on the moon and got them back safely multiple times."
Tended to shut them up, at least for a moment. ~ Matt Roberts

And there is one disconcerting thing about working with a computer – it's likely to talk back to you. You make some tiny mistake in your FORTRAN language – putting a letter in the wrong column, say, or omitting a comma – and the 360 comes to a screeching halt and prints out rude remarks, like "ILLEGAL FORMAT," or "UNKNOWN PROBLEM," or, if the man who wrote the program was really feeling nasty that morning, "WHAT'S THE MATTER STUPID? CAN'T YOU READ?" Everyone who uses a computer frequently has had, from time to time, a mad desire to attack the precocious abacus with an axe. ~ John Drury Clark

Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. ~ Philip Greenspun

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN. ~ Alan Perlis