3 ms·

Yes, I could see it being preferable or at least on the same level as Cobol and certainly better than using Assembly for programming text adventures, but surely

Yes, I could see it being preferable or at least on the same level as Cobol and certainly better than using Assembly for programming text adventures, but surely that's just due to certain limitations of the times. Lisp came out like a year later (not sure how long until you could purchase a lisp machine) and is a much better general purpose language (some would claim it's still unsurpassed). Later we had things like APL, C, Pascal...etc and Fortran was left to numerical work. All that to say I think Fortran can only claim to be what we call "general purpose" for a very limited window of time in the very early stages of computing.

skissane 4y ago
> Lisp came out like a year later In the early 1970s, almost every mainframe and minicomputer had a Fortran compiler available for it. Lisp was much rarer. Pascal had only just been invented and C was only just being invented. If you wanted your software to be as widely portable as possible, your choices were Fortran or Cobol, and no wonder why many preferred the former. (Especially if we are talking about software in academic/research environments, where Fortran was far more common than Cobol.) This has little to do with Fortran and Lisp's respective years of introduction (1957 vs 1958), but rather how far they'd managed to spread in their first 15 years (almost everywhere for Fortran versus only to a narrow subset of academic research institutions for Lisp.) > Fortran can only claim to be what we call "general purpose" for a very limited window of time in the very early stages of computing. The timeframe in which Fortran saw “general purpose” use spanned at least a decade (maybe closer to two) and was after the “very early stages” (during which almost everything was in assembler - or even hand-assembled machine code - and portable code was basically unheard of)
- 7thaccount 4y ago
  10 years out of ~70ish total is a pretty limited window in my eyes. I guess that's all a little subjective. Thanks for the additional information though. I figured there was a little more choice in the 70s.

skissane 4y ago

> Lisp came out like a year later In the early 1970s, almost every mainframe and minicomputer had a Fortran compiler available for it. Lisp was much rarer. Pascal had only just been invented and C was only just being invented. If you wanted your software to be as widely portable as possible, your choices were Fortran or Cobol, and no wonder why many preferred the former. (Especially if we are talking about software in academic/research environments, where Fortran was far more common than Cobol.) This has little to do with Fortran and Lisp's respective years of introduction (1957 vs 1958), but rather how far they'd managed to spread in their first 15 years (almost everywhere for Fortran versus only to a narrow subset of academic research institutions for Lisp.) > Fortran can only claim to be what we call "general purpose" for a very limited window of time in the very early stages of computing. The timeframe in which Fortran saw “general purpose” use spanned at least a decade (maybe closer to two) and was after the “very early stages” (during which almost everything was in assembler - or even hand-assembled machine code - and portable code was basically unheard of)

7thaccount 4y ago
10 years out of ~70ish total is a pretty limited window in my eyes. I guess that's all a little subjective. Thanks for the additional information though. I figured there was a little more choice in the 70s.