Fortran

For a programming language with a half-century legacy, FORTRAN not surprisingly has accumulated its share of jokes and folklore.

Sourced

• As I said in my comments to the committee, [Fortran 90' would be a] nice language, too bad it's not Fortran.
  • Dan Davison - http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/88q4/11267.7.html
  • Also commonly applied to other such evolutions of programming languages. E.g: "Perl 6 would be a nice language, but it's not going to be Perl."

• FORTRAN's tragic fate has been its wide acceptance, mentally chaining thousands and thousands of programmers to our past mistakes.
  • Edsger W. Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer, 1972 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 15 (10), (October 1972): pp. 859–866

• In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.
  • Edsger W. Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" (1975) EWD498. Published in ACM SIGPLAN Notices 17:5 (May 1982), pp. 13–15.

• FORTRAN—the "infantile disorder"—, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
  • Edsger W. Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?". 1975-06-18. Retrieved on 2008-08-20. 

• The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language.
  • Ed Post, Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal, 1982

• People are very flexible and learn to adjust to strange surroundings — they can become accustomed to read Lisp and Fortran programs, for example.
  • Leon Sterling and Ehud Shapiro, Art of PROLOG, MIT Press

• FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.
  • Ken Thompson, 1983 Turing Award Lecture[1], Communications of the ACM 27 (8), August 1984, pp. 761-763.

Attributed

• 95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran.
  • Ken Thompson, circa 2005; attributed by Lohr, Steve (2007-03-19). "John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies". Retrieved on 2007-03-20. 

• The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
  • Early FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers

• Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice.
  • Sun FORTRAN Reference Manual

• Warning: Go directly to Jail. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200.
  • Easter egg in the SDS/Xerox Sigma 7 FORTRAN compiler, when the statement GO TO JAIL was encountered.

• "A computer without COBOL and FORTRAN is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup or mustard." — a fortune cookie from the Unix program fortune.

Unsourced

• You can tell how far we have to go, when FORTRAN is the language of supercomputers.
  • Steven Feiner ^{[citation needed]}

• God is Real, unless declared Integer.
  • J. Allan Toogood, FORTRAN programmer (In FORTRAN, undeclared variables can be typed according to their first letter, so "God" would be a real variable, under default implicit typing rules.)

• The sooner the world forgets that FORTRAN ever existed, the better.
  • Attributed to Joseph Weizenbaum

References in popular culture

• In the pilot episode of the Futurama series, the robot Bender drinks a bottle of Olde FORTRAN Malt Liquor (alluding to "Olde English" malt liquor)
• Computer folklore has incorrectly attributed the loss of the Mariner 1 space probe to a syntax error in a Fortran program. For example, "Recall the first American space probe to Venus, reportedly lost because Fortran cannot recognize a missing comma in a DO statement…"(Hoare, C. A. R.. Hints on Programming Language Design.  in Sigact/Sigplan Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages. October 1973. , reprinted in Horowitz. Programming Languages, A Grand Tour, 3rd ed. ). See Risks Digest: Mariner 1, Vol. 9: Iss. 54, 12 Dec 89 (and Risks Digest: "Mariner I -- no holds BARred", Vol. 8: Iss. 75) for what really happened.
• In 1982, 10,000 Maniacs released a song named "Planned Obsolescence" that includes the repeated line — "Science [is] truth for life, in Fortran tongue the answer".