All IT professionals…and those who like IT as a hobby, should mourn the loss of John Backus, the creator of the Fortran programming language, He passed away last Saturday at the age of 82. Backus wrote Fortran during the 1950s, which reduced the amount of time needed to process data by a factor of 20. He remained at IBM his entire career when he retired in 1991.
My last IT job back East, in the beginning, still used Fortran to write database processing applications, and that was ten years ago. They eventually converted over to C++, and while that’s a litte bit more advanced than Fortran, it still may be behind the times. But I’ll take Fortran over RPiG!
Rest in Peace, Mr. Backus.