Re:Programming is hard
by 908B64B197 on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @01:28PM
(#26714779)
Electrical Engineering departments were also starting to offer more and more "programming and computer" related courses as well. At a lot of universities these eventually branched out to become Computer or Software Engineering programs.
My uncle worked at the National Institutes of Health for about 35 years doing bioinformatics and protein structure modeling. In FORTRAN. Always in FORTRAN. He knew other stuff, but the bulk of his work was always FORTRAN.
Re:Programming is hard
by BlueTemplar on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @03:26AM
(#26721449)
And young people are still learning Fortran today, though it's not the most common language any more, and we tend to learn several different ones.
Re:Programming is hard
by mywittyname on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @09:22AM
(#26724523)
I didn't learn fortran in university, but I did have to learn it for a job. It's still THE language for scientific computing. So in any job in or adjacent to scientific computing, you're bound to run into fortran.
I have a good friend that worked during the 60s era programming with punch cards doing applied physics work in FORTRAN (pre 77) which was already pretty big by then. You could probably go back a bit further but I don't think much was being actively taught as a sort of course one might expect today then. So I'd say you could have at most 65ish years of programming since formal use in college.
No, it was not software engineering at the time per se but I'd absolutely call it programming.