FORTRAN

Reading Slashdot this morning informed me that John W. Backus, the developer of FORTRAN died last weekend (NY Times link). Aerospace/computational fluid dynamics geeks might be amongst the dying breed who still use fixed-form FORTRAN as their bread-and-butter programming language. All of us have at different times expressed frustration at the quirks of the language, and wished that it had nifty features which made our lives easier in the more higher level programming languages. But I doubt very few languages can even come close to beating FORTRAN's efficiency when it comes to serious number crunching algorithms. And, yes, it is still FORTRAN for us old-timers.

On an unrelated note, one comment on Slashdot pointed out the hilarity of the Slashdot title for this article John W. Backus Dies at 82; Developed FORTRAN. Headline writing, especially in English, is an art.