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1 min readMay 9, 2020

FORTRAN was developed first, gained traction first and fits a completely different use case than COBOL. The reason COBOL retained such dominance in the 70ties up into the 80ties is that there was a divide between academic CS research (where languages like ALGO, Lisp and C became popular) and the business world that COBOL was designed to serve the needs of. To put it simply: they were different groups of programmers with different needs who did not see the overlap for a long time because they were siloed from each other. This divide still exists to a lesser degree today: it’s why Excel has basically become a runtime environment and programmers from academia struggle to ship production ready code.

Marianne Bellotti
Marianne Bellotti

Written by Marianne Bellotti

Author of Kill It with Fire Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)

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