CITED FROM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#FORTRAN_quotations

FORTRAN quotations

For a programming language with a half-century legacy, FORTRAN not surprisingly has accumulated its share of jokes and folklore.

[edit] From the historical record

• God is Real, unless declared Integer. J. Allan Toogood, FORTRAN programmer.^[15]

• FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use. —Edsger Dijkstra, circa 1970.

• "The sooner the world forgets that FORTRAN ever existed, the better." (imputed to Joseph Weizenbaum)

• "95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran." — Ken Thompson, circa 2005^[16]

• "The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change." —Early FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers^[17]

• "Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice." —Sun FORTRAN Reference Manual

• "People are very flexible and learn to adjust to strange surroundings — they can become accustomed to read Lisp and Fortran programs, for example." —Art of PROLOG, Leon Sterling and Ehud Shapiro, MIT Press

• "Warning: Go directly to Jail. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200." — Easter egg in the SDS/Xerox Sigma 7 FORTRAN compiler, when the statement GO TO JAIL was encountered. The message is from a Chance card in Monopoly.

• "A computer without COBOL and FORTRAN is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup or mustard." — a fortune cookie from the Unix program fortune.

• "The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language." — Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal, Ed Post, 1982

[edit] References in popular culture

• In the pilot episode of the Futurama series, the robot Bender drinks a bottle of Olde FORTRAN Malt Liquor (alluding to "Olde English" malt liquor)

• Computer folklore has incorrectly attributed the loss of the Mariner 1 space probe to a typographical error in a Fortran program. For example, "Recall the first American space probe to Venus, reportedly lost because Fortran cannot recognize a missing comma in a DO statement…"^[18].
• In 1982, 10,000 Maniacs released a song named "Planned Obsolescence" that includes the repeated line — "Science [is] truth for life, in Fortran tongue the answer".