Fortran

It's sort of like the difference between if I'm creating resources to teach computer programming, maybe I'll have videos or really fun animations of this is how you use a bracket or a nested if statement because there are a double digit portion of the population that work in IT today.

If I were writing a computer programming manual for Fortran in 1960, this is a very specialized group of people that would work at a government mainframe center, and it's going to be extraordinarily technical because you know that this is only designed for somebody who is in computer science and is in the top 1% of their class.

And this is what literacy is.

I mean, it's a highly specialized, highly intricate thing.

I remember being in your office for the first time in 96 and seeing a computer sitting over in the corner.

I think it was running Fortran, perhaps.

So you guys have been tech for a long time before tech was cool.

What is your perspective on these tools?

And the history behind Kahn highlights exactly why lazy evaluation is so necessary.

John McCarthy, the inventor of LISP, he was trying to write a chess program in Fortran around 1957.

Oh, wow.

Chess in 1957.

Yeah.

And the Fortran F statement back then was an ordinary function.

It required all arguments, all possible paths to be evaluated before it made a decision.

Wait, if you're programming chess and you force the computer to fully calculate every possible sequence of moves for the rest of the game just to evaluate a single if-then statement?

Yeah, it's basically like, again, I just didn't think about it, but it does take a mental leap to go, the idea of structured data is not just for saving structured data, right? Like it does take someone to go, hey, wait, we could have all these other things.

Like if you have a relational database or that idea that we're going to have like relations in a database, wait, why couldn't we compute that way? Like why couldn't the internal structure of the program look like that? Why does it have to look like something like Lisp or something like this or just Fortran where it's just a bunch of arrays, right? Couldn't we do this other thing? Right.

And so that was really interesting.

And, you know, I mean, I don't know.

At the same time, I think that COBOL 60 would have been, like COBOL 60 would have been that year as well, right? Well, so Flomatic, which was the precursor to COBOL, kind of like, I mean, Grace Hopper kind of said or says roughly like COBOL is like mostly Flomatic, right? Like she's like, it's kind of mostly the same thing, but slightly different.

It's got some other stuff pushed in there.

I don't remember when Flomatic started, but it would have been like all those languages are coming online at that time, like Fortran, Lisp.

They're all kind of being worked on simultaneously to some extent.

Engineering might be the most challenging because I don't really understand technical stuff too well.

I had a traumatic experience in grad school with Fortran, which has left me a little scared of coding ever since.

Yeah.

But also, you know, it...