Happy birthday, modern computing.

[trdsf]

"JJ" from Doonesbury?

My point was that Fortran made positive sense in equation terms and Cobol was so highly structured and didn't make any specific sense reading it.  You could look at Fortran and understand in real terms what was going on.  Cobol needed so much structure that you couldn't follow the logic without a lot of work.  A comma out of place in Cobol didn't stand out.  Any symbol error in Fortran just jumped out at you.

Well, the whole idea behind COBOL was that it should approximate "natural" language and would have greater portability between machines; of course, since it was designed by a US DoD committee, it's exactly as clunky as you think something designed by a DoD committee would be.

I'd still kind of like to learn FORTRAN or ALGOL or one of the old hoary ones (other than LISP, which I picked up in college).

[Gawdzilla Sama]

COBOL got businesses around the world into computing.

[Baruch]

COBOL got businesses around the world into computing.

Business majors did COBOL.  Engineers did Fortran.

trdsf - so you did Lisp in school?  So sorry for you.  Pascal was a really nice educational computer language.  Algol is almost a predecessor of Pascal.

[Baruch]

What programmers are like today ...

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/coding-explained-in-25-profound-comics-8847ea03819c

I thought the comic version would be at the right level for most of you ;-)

[Cavebear]

Never did Fortran, so I can't comment on relatives.

Fortran is entirely equational.  You write a line and it either works or it doesn't.  And I loved the GOTO subroutines where repeated operations were used. 

[Jason78]

Babbage did it with steampunk.

[Unbeliever]

Babbage couldn't've done it at all without the help of Ada Lovelace.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Babbage couldn't've done it at all without the help of Ada Lovelace.

Ada done better with a computer. Honestly.

[Baruch]

http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/engines/

Why did the British government fund this?  Babbage had successfully broken ciphers during the Crimean War ... something kept secret a long time.

Of course this is why modern electronic computers were developed in WW II.  That and calculating artillery firing tables.

[Cavebear]

Babbage couldn't've done it at all without the help of Ada Lovelace.

The women who contributed and didn't get the recognition should be recognized posthumously. 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Introduction to Computing at Purdue included all relevant people and their contributions. Not the first time I'd heard of her, but it was news to some younger people.

[Cavebear]

Introduction to Computing at Purdue included all relevant people and their contributions. Not the first time I'd heard of her, but it was news to some younger people.

I learned of her and other ladies from Cosmos.

[Baruch]

The women who contributed and didn't get the recognition should be recognized posthumously.

They are ... or nobody would know about them.  The movie about Nasa though, was a bit ... distorted.  Men also did Fortran on mainframes.  Why when a woman gives a shit, does anyone else care?  Guys trying to pick up girls by complementing their hair, or their IBM cards?

[Baruch]

Introduction to Computing at Purdue included all relevant people and their contributions. Not the first time I'd heard of her, but it was news to some younger people.

Young people, by definition, are immature, inexperienced and ignorant.  But they are the hope of the world.

Bet you didn't hear about Enigma, or Babbage's secret agent work.  The reason for all the computing power really is spam email and video porn.

[Cavebear]

Introduction to Computing at Purdue included all relevant people and their contributions. Not the first time I'd heard of her, but it was news to some younger people.

Were you older than the other students?  I took some college classes where I was twice the age of most of the other students.  It was "interesting".