[Discuss] "Fortran father John Backus, dead at 82"

[pw]

Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> 
>>
>> Backus is quoted as saying, "You need the willingness to fail all the
>> time." "You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very
>> hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that
>> over and over until you find one that does work."
>>
>> http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/03/20/fortran-father-john-backus-dead-at-82/ 
>>
> 
> Great quote. I wish somebody had beaten that philosophy into my head when I
> was a lot younger.... :-)
> 
> Alan

Awe, come on. Failing is easy. I do it all the time. ;)

Fortran has lots of life in it yet.
Look at it this way, MS Visual BASIC is still around,
and it's a zillion times worse than Fortran ever was.

If we scale longevity of Fortran by the success of
Visual BASIC....

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
! A Program to Estimate Fotran Success By Scaling
! Against The Visual BASIC Fraud
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

	PROGRAM scalefortransuccess

		REAL AZillion
		REAL VbFraudSuccess, GoodOleFortranSuccess
  		CHARACTER SaluteToMrBackus*20
		INTEGER J, K
	
		VbFraudSuccess = 10
		AZillion = 10000000
		DO J=1,100,1
			DO K=1,100,1
				AZillion = AZillion * 10000000
			END DO
		END DO
		
		WRITE(*,*) 'Enter Your Name'
		READ * , SaluteToMrBackus

		GoodOleFortranSuccess=VbFraudSuccess*AZillion

		WRITE(*,*) 'Fortran is going to last ', GoodOleFortranSuccess
		WRITE(*,*) ' years. Signed :', SaluteToMrBackus

	END



Seriously though, the man was brilliant. I hope we
all follow his example and learn to fail more often without fear.


Peter