
The Fortran Automatic Coding System (1957) [pdf] - headalgorithm
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Fortran/102663113.05.01.acc.pdf
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kazinator
Compiling used to be called "automatic coding".

The word "compiling" existed and referred to more or less what we now call
linking: making a program image by catenating together the needed smaller
programs (subroutines).

The terminology made sense: translating isn't compiling.

Programming in a higher level language wasn't considered "coding": "coding"
referred to taking the higher level specification and encoding it or the
machine: writing machine code. This was done by hand, and when software
started doing it, that was then, naturally, "automatic coding".

Today, writing a shell script to rename your MP3's is "coding". :)

~~~
drewg123
And that mp3 renaming shell script probably uses orders of magnitude more CPU
time than the most complex FORTRAN simulations in the 1960s did.

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drewg123
My mother was a programmer in this era. She got her degree in math in 1954.
Rather than being a teacher, she went to work for Union Carbide in Buffalo to
work on "this new thing called a computer". I have a great Union Carbide PR
photo of her up on a stool, moving a jumper cable on a room-sized computer. I
really need to digitize that.

She learned FORTRAN shortly after, and was a FORTRAN programmer for her entire
career, later working at Calspan and then a spin-off defense contractor. She
used FORTRAN for her entire career.

I fondly remember her making her grocery lists and taking notes on the used
punch cards that she'd bring home from work.

My first internship in the late 80s was at another defense contractor, and I
had to program a GUI in FORTRAN (!!) on a VAXstation. I remember coming to her
for help, since I knew C and Lisp, and the whole FORTRAN column number thing
threw me for a loop.

~~~
hpcjoe
I remember seeing the VAXstation GUI bit in late 88 or so in grad school. It
was weird interfacing Fortran and C calls back then.

I forgot the name of the interface, but I remember that creating a window to
start working in was a very long function call in Fortran. Basically it opened
an X window in the framework. You then set up a canvas and did more operations
on it.

In 1990, I switched over to an SGI Irix machine, and graphics became much
easier. We had a molecular dynamics viewer called "shaker" that was written in
Irix GL at the time. Hard to use, and my thesis advisor and I didn't have SGIs
in our office. So, I wrote my own version using Watcom Fortran(!) and called
it "mover".

My thesis advisor shook her head at that ... as our visualization was with
"mover" and "shaker".

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ape4
Nice looking cover of the manual [http://i.liketightpants.net/and/the-fortran-
automatic-coding...](http://i.liketightpants.net/and/the-fortran-automatic-
coding-system-for-the-ibm-704)

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hpcjoe
What is interesting to me is that Fortran is still relevant 62 years later.
It's changed, dramatically.

I taught myself Fortran 77, then Fortran 90 in grad school. F2008 looks quite
good. If it had a REPL, it could be a very interesting environment.

Honestly, I am using Julia more and more, but I've got 30 year old Fortran
code that still compiles/runs nicely on my linux boxen, that started out on
Vaxen and Cray supers.

~~~
certik
I just opensourced LFortran that provides a REPL for Fortran, among other
things:
[https://gitlab.com/lfortran/lfortran](https://gitlab.com/lfortran/lfortran),
only a subset of Fortran is supported for now, but it's a start. Here is a
demo in a Jupyter notebook:
[https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/gist/certik/f1d28a486510810d824...](https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/gist/certik/f1d28a486510810d824869ab0c491b1c).

The motivation is precisely as you described. In fact, Julia was my initial
motivation too: but I didn't want a new language, I wanted the modern
interactive environment for Fortran.

In order to get first users and before full Fortran 2018 is supported, I
figured out how to parse GFortran's mod files and can interface to GFortran's
array descriptors, I am now integrating it in the interactive compiler / REPL.
After that is done, for a subset of Fortran, I think this will already be
usable (one could use GFortran to compile production code, and use LFortran to
use parts of it interactively) and I will announce it more widely. I think
this will happen in the next few months.

~~~
hpcjoe
Nice! Will check it out!

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mpweiher
I love how we’re still making the same mistake of thinking that, whatever our
next innovation in programming is, it will finally “automate” or “eliminate”
coding.

Nope. If you write or draw something and it then executes, you are
programming, you are coding.

~~~
wglb
To be fair, the compiler (as well as the Cobol compiler) did reduce the effort
by a factor of perhaps 10.

So yes, you weren't coding in machine language any more, but the compiler was.

~~~
mpweiher
Yes, all these things are massive improvements.

It’s just an illusion that this somehow eliminates coding as an activity. You
just code using a different, hopefully more productive language and/or
mechanism.

~~~
wglb
Coding back in that day had a different meaning. Today it means any kind of
coding--then it meant generating the assembler language.

~~~
rootbear
It's interesting to me how the word coding has mostly replaced programming in
many contexts. We now hear of efforts to teach kids "coding" when not long ago
that would have been teaching "programming". It would be interesting to delve
into why that change in language took place.

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TomMasz
It took 6 minutes to compile a 47-line Fortran program.

