alt Hacker NewsRead the sources carefully. Fortran quote is not his; he quoted it. Also remember that he was talking about pre-Fortran77 era. F77 tried to fix some of the criticisms though did not succeed fully. Here is a nice dig-in about the quote https://limited.systems/articles/dijkstra-fortran/
Another note to remember that John Backus, the team lead of the Fortran gang, was in the Algol committee. So these folks knew what they are talking about and spoke to each other periodically. Even John Backus said, Fortran is not the final interface that we should have.
It keeps spinning in the programming circles half-quoted versions of half-baked quotes from original sources. These pioneers, even when they disagreed, had pretty precise arguments and very rarely feeling the feelies.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498... – How do we tell truths that might hurt? 1975
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.
He told the truth and in turn Fortran corrected its course, but Dijkstra probably didn't change his mind about it.
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> These pioneers, even when they disagreed, had pretty precise arguments and very rarely feeling the feelies.
The feud between Backus and Dijkstra kinda persuaded me of the opposite.
https://medium.com/@acidflask/this-guys-arrogance-takes-your...