[Hemospectrum]

> What’s happened, of course, with FORTRAN is that it has become the lingua franca of the computing world. It is the one language that everybody understands to some level of detail — it is on every computer, in every country, made by every manufacturer — and one could learn to use FORTRAN reading books at every level of complexity, written in every language on the surface of the earth. It is universal, like the air we breathe, and I don’t think it’s going to be displaced for a long time to come.

"I met a traveler from an antique land..."

[lokedhs]

To be fair, most languages in use today are just FORTRAN with diffrent syntax.

Both Lisp and array language programmers are sadly somewhat rare.

[noosphr]

Fortran's genesis is quite different from the algol family of languages which is what everyone uses today. This is why numerical computation always feels a bit off compared to the host language, be is numpy or GSL.

[somat]

Comparing lisp and APL is interesting because they feel almost opposite in approach to language design.

Lisp optimizes for syntax simplicity, the "all possible computation is expressible with these three symbols" sort of thing. see also: forth

APL takes the more traditional math syntax approach and optimizes for space. "how to most concisely express an operation"

As a tangent. I have to admit, as a casual enjoyer of math, I sometimes wish that institutionally they had gone the lisp route instead of the APL route. a simple universal syntax instead of the super dense domain specific ones they use. I understand why they do it. easier to manipulate. But I hate getting stuck at the beginning, functionally illiterate, just trying to figure out their syntax.

[BoingBoomTschak]

  > What Made Lisp Different:
  > 1. Conditionals (if-then-else construct)
  > 2. A function type (functions as first class objects)
  > 3. Recursion
  > 4. A new concept of variables (dynamic typing and pass-by-pointer)
  > 5. Garbage-collection

https://paulgraham.com/diff.html

Looks like most modern languages have more in common with Lisp than FORTRAN, besides the syntax.

[lokedhs]

That list is incomplete. Those are things that Lisp invented but is now commonplace. What it also invented but rather few languages also support is the capability of metaprogramming, being able to treat code as data.

[BoingBoomTschak]

You're replying to a CL fan. I didn't paste the full list, only the relevant points.

[elch]

(1978)