I’ve decided to write a series of blog posts in the category “Programming Languages I Have Known” (PLIHK). This is a cross-post from my personal blog. I will understand if you want to bail out now.

My first exposure to a programming language was in elementary school when my father brought home some COBOL manuals for me to read, but since I didn’t have access to a computer to actually write and test programs then I didn’t really learn anything from them. I will make no claims to understanding COBOL.

Instead, my first actual experience writing programs was when I took a Numerical Methods course as an undergraduate. I found out the week before class started I was expected to know FORTRAN, but my brother Erick had taken a class in it and still had his textbook, and the Numerical Methods textbook (which I think I still have somewhere) had many examples, so it really wasn’t hard to pick up enough to do the assignments.

FORTRAN was an amazing accomplishment for its time, and it proved that programming in a level above machine code or assembler was not only possible but desirable. So I’m not going to bad-mouth FORTRAN at all. That being said, an awful lot has been learned about programming language design since then, and the only reasons I can see to use it now are “historical curiosity” or having a large body of existing code needing maintenance that might take more effort to rewrite than is justified.

In case you’re wondering, the main thing I remember from my Numerical Methods class is “floating point numbers are fiddly.”