They were actually saying that learning Fortran is enough to understand all the important concepts. It was not about Turing completeness. They actually thought

They were actually saying that learning Fortran is enough to understand all the important concepts. It was not about Turing completeness. They actually thought that languages are all more or less the same. Maybe they knew about exceptions, like Prolog, but didn't mention them because of their perceived irrelevance. "They" are quite rare among professors, but they do exist. Sometimes, it is the course, not the professor, which implies that Fortran is enough. Such a course made me study algorithms. The syntax was some sort of Pascal. The semantic was first order and imperative. And because no compiler existed for such a language, they acted as if the thing was "language independent".