John Backus Dies - Creator of FORTRAN

FORTRAN has an incredible history. Some of the greatest achievements in the last century were dependent upon Fortran and it's derivitives. I remember a huge hanger sized room full of IBM 7094's all humming merrily away with FORTRAN defining the flight parameters of the Apollo Moon Program. North American Aviation employed dozens of FORTRAN programmers who seemed to never sleep in those heady days where inventions were routinely scheduled.

I enjoyed programming in FORTRAN some 30 year ago for the IBM 370. The language included as default complex numbers and matrix algebra. I was becoming a fanatic until someone declared that C would be the definitive language. But C included nothing about complex numbers or matrix algebra, so soon after I abandoned software. In the mid 80s I turned to program Xilinx FPGAs using a diagrammatic program that allows to compile from a hierarchical schematic diagram of the logic function blocks. But recently the dominant beaurocracy of C has been introducing by force of stupidity new "languages" to program Xilinx FPGAs, just in text, no more schematics. A single schematic with a few functions turns now into several pages of text. I see no advantage at all. With a schematic diagram I see a whole landscape of what is going on, like a city map. To drive around a large city do you prefer an illustrated map or a heavy book with GPS directives? I prefer an illustrated map, images are by far more explicit than texts. This time I will not give-up.

Jaime