"You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN"
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A real punchline disguised as a diagnostic. Perlis isn’t actually asking you to litigate FORTRAN’s merits; he’s using it as a Rorschach test for how a programmer relates to time, fashion, and the stubborn physics of legacy code. FORTRAN is the perfect prop: old enough to trigger smugness, important enough to refuse burial. Your “attitude” toward its “continuing vitality” reveals whether you think computing is a parade of new toys or an accretion of working systems that institutions can’t, and often shouldn’t, discard.
The word “vitality” does sly work here. It frames the language less as a relic and more as an organism that keeps surviving because it still feeds on real-world needs: scientific computing, numerical performance, decades of verified routines. Perlis is needling the kind of programmer who treats age as a bug and novelty as a feature. Dismissing FORTRAN can signal a narrow, presentist ego: if it’s not in your toolchain, it doesn’t count. Overpraising it, though, can flag a different limitation: reverence for the familiar, fear of conceptual change.
Perlis wrote in an era when “software engineering” was still trying to become a grown-up discipline, and the industry was already accumulating sedimentary layers of code. The subtext is pragmatic and a little cynical: the future will not arrive cleanly. Your maturity shows in whether you can respect what persists, critique it honestly, and still build past it without pretending you’re the first person to code.
The word “vitality” does sly work here. It frames the language less as a relic and more as an organism that keeps surviving because it still feeds on real-world needs: scientific computing, numerical performance, decades of verified routines. Perlis is needling the kind of programmer who treats age as a bug and novelty as a feature. Dismissing FORTRAN can signal a narrow, presentist ego: if it’s not in your toolchain, it doesn’t count. Overpraising it, though, can flag a different limitation: reverence for the familiar, fear of conceptual change.
Perlis wrote in an era when “software engineering” was still trying to become a grown-up discipline, and the industry was already accumulating sedimentary layers of code. The subtext is pragmatic and a little cynical: the future will not arrive cleanly. Your maturity shows in whether you can respect what persists, critique it honestly, and still build past it without pretending you’re the first person to code.
Quote Details
| Topic | Coding & Programming |
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