Turn About

Many years ago I took several procedural programming language classes. Assembly language and FORTRAN (pre-Fort 77), were the major players. I then spent about twenty years of my life in the US Navy in electronics where periodically I was exposed to some basic computer theory as well as control system applications. Through out all of that I had an unexamined position regarding one of the languages that I had used at a superficial level. I like many of my peers considered BASIC to be a language with training wheels.

In spare moments over the last week I've been building a small application to do a work related task. Writing the application allowed me to learn the basics of the process that I was programming. The language that I wrote this in -- VisualBasic! The ineresting thing is that none of the programmers that I know have used FORTRAN in years.

That is not to say that FORTRAN is dead, just that it is now a niche language, useful in its place but not a general use language like Java or C.