Quotes About Fortran

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.

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

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

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

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

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

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.