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  • > Now a question: Since we're obviously thousands of times better at producing compilers than we were fifteen years ago, so much so that a single undergraduate can write a passable one in four months, why hasn't IBM invested millions of dollars and hundreds of programmer-years to produce a super FORTRAN I compiler that's thousands of times better than the FORTRAN H compiler?

    s/FORTRAN I/Mythos/ for the 2026 version of this.

    by photios
  • I agree with the overall point of the article, but I feel compelled to be _that guy_ and point out that most of IBM's systems programming involved various dialects of PL/I, not Fortran, and they went through a bunch of different iterations on those compilers and their code generators.
    by ch_123
  • I went to the University of Arkansas in the fall of 1993, into Computer Systems Engineering, and we were the first freshman class to work on C/C++ as a primary language to be learned, instead of FORTRAN. I still to this day haven't written a single line of that language, but I find it fascinating.
    by diseasedyak
  • How did we get so much better at writing compilers? Was it a better understanding of how to make syntax trees with ADTs etc?
    by adamddev1
  • > We don't really know how to program yet, or how to manage our programs. We don't really know what we want to say or how to say it. We don't have good computer languages for expressing what we want to computer to do. We don't know how to think about programming.

    I think this is still true today. Software is only just starting and there is a lot of room to find better ways of doing things.

    by fsmv
  • Fortran H was faster than the fastest punchcard feeder of the time. That bottleneck is unfortunately long gone, without the same magnitude of improvement on the other side. (Physical limits, amazing optimisations, etc.)

    Last time I was working with CCE, I was looking at blistering runtime speeds, but six or seven hour compiles. Huge codebase (40mil+ LoC), and the optimisations were great, but not exactly a fantastic dev lifestyle.

    by shakna
  • Beautifully written but when the lack of a better compiler gets attributed to rational actions my brain glitched. That’s not fitting my mental model of how big corps operate at all!

    Occam’s razor IBM didn’t invest in Fortran I because the internal political environment at the corporation didn’t have the incentives aligned to do so. This is completely orthogonal to whether they could have used a better compiler or not.

    by wood_spirit
  • > Computer programming is still a black art. It's less than fifty years old, and nobody is very good at it yet. We can make better tools than we know how to use.

    I don't think this has changed much at all since 1992. Now you can say that it's less than 90 years old, and nobody is very good at it yet.

    And most of our profession has already given up on getting any better at it because a machine can spit out code that compiles.

    by miyoji

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