[ConservativeMind]

FORTRAN has nothing to do with any problem.

This author is nuts.

[Bryan24]

I googled “FORTRAN Assigning values error” and got result after result after result of hits talking about the errors and pitfalls of assigning values in FORTRAN.

I think using FORTRAN is a symptom of the problem, not the main problem.

[Reily]

It’s just a journalist trying to use scientific sounding words. He doesn’t understand them.

[JohnBrowdie]

FORTRAN has nothing to do with any problem. This author is nuts.

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completely agree. it's another one of those senseless technology/vendor based religious wars (apple! PC! oracle DB !! MSSQL!! WINDOWS!! LINUX!!), and the dipsh*t author wants to poke holes in his choice of tools. you had an idea the article was going to go that way when the first two paragraphs were about how great he was.

ferguson lost the handle on his overall design, or his algorithm sucked to begin with, or he never understood the problem, or maybe he's just a crappy programmer.

but that the dumbest damn thing I've read in quite some time.

[JohnBrowdie]

I am supremely confident that ferguson would have f*cked it up even worse in c++

[no-s]

FORTRAN has nothing to do with any problem.

hah, I want to say something naughty but I'm afraid of starting a religious conflict. Also the author is just regurgitating what they heard/read.

However I would like to report that in the 70's and 80's I converted millions of lines of FORTRAN code into APL, mostly models from academics. Typically the APL implementation, including the test suite, was 1/100 to 1/1000 the size of the original. From this I assumed the actual information density of FORTRAN was very low. Of course, the ratio of bugs to LOC is roughly the same across languages, all other things being roughly equal. Often my test suite would discover severe bugs in the original unnoticed by the original authors because they didn't have grant money to eradicate bugs, haha.