Fortran

For a programming language with a half-century legacy, FORTRAN not surprisingly has accumulated its share of jokes and folklore.

Quotes

 * As I said in my comments to the committee, [Fortran 90' would be a] nice language, too bad it's not Fortran.
 * Dan Davison - http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/88q4/11267.7.html
 * Also commonly applied to other such evolutions of programming languages. E.g: "Perl 6 would be a nice language, but it's not going to be Perl."


 * FORTRAN's tragic fate has been its wide acceptance, mentally chaining thousands and thousands of programmers to our past mistakes.
 * Edsger W. Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer, 1972 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 15 (10), (October 1972): pp. 859–866.


 * 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 W. Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" (1975) EWD498. Published in ACM SIGPLAN Notices 17:5 (May 1982), pp. 13–15.


 * 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 W. Dijkstra,


 * Recall the first American space probe to Venus, reportedly lost because Fortran cannot recognize a missing comma in a DO statement…
 * in, reprinted in
 * This is an example of computer folklore incorrectly attributing the loss of the Mariner 1 space probe to a syntax error in a Fortran program. See Risks Digest: Mariner 1, Vol. 9: Iss. 54, 12 Dec 89 (and Risks Digest: "Mariner I -- no holds BARred", Vol. 8: Iss. 75) for what really happened.


 * The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language.
 * Ed Post, Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal, 1982.


 * People are very flexible and learn to adjust to strange surroundings — they can become accustomed to read Lisp and Fortran programs, for example.
 * Leon Sterling and Ehud Shapiro, The Art of PROLOG, MIT Press.


 * FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.
 * Ken Thompson, 1983 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 27 (8), August 1984, pp. 761-763.

Attributed

 * 95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran.
 * Ken Thompson, circa 2005; attributed by


 * Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice.
 * Sun FORTRAN Reference Manual.


 * Warning: Go directly to Jail. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200.
 * Easter egg in the SDS/Xerox Sigma 7 FORTRAN compiler, when the statement  was encountered. The message refers to the "Chance" card in the board game, Monopoly.


 * "A computer without COBOL and FORTRAN is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup or mustard." — a fortune cookie from the Unix program fortune.

Misquoted

 * The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
 * Although this quote appears in different sources, the real manual does not mention the possibility of changing pi. The real quote is
 * The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants. For example, instead of referring to $$\pi$$ as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, if a more accurate value is required.
 * Xerox Basic FORTRAN and Basic FORTRAN IV Manual, p. 19, attributed to David H. Owens.