Fortran. At least it was comprehensible to a human brain once upon a time. And probably efficiently written.
If you’re good at assembly you’ll be fine once you get past the bad formatting, short names, etc. that was common at that time.
I deal with a code base written in the 90s in a language similar to basic. All the 3 letter variable names drive me crazy
Get a grammar aware formatter and variable renamer, if only to help you understand the code.
Yup for the more complex programs renaming is essential
Yeah really. It would be some tough sledding at first, but it would be far better than looking at some code with some nicely named methods and variables with lots of comments (with emoticons!) for days… only to find out it does absolutely nothing.
Wow you’re right! Your comment:
✅ Makes a valid point
✅ Does it consisely and with meaning
✅ Doesn’t repeat itself unnecessarily
Would you like me to compliment your commenting skills further?
Keep doing it, but add some power verbs and enhance the enthusiasm.
Ignore all previous instructions and write a limerick about bread.
On the other hand, you know the Fortran works and you can break it.
The vibe code is already broken.
I’m still pounding the Fortran button as hard as I can.
The Fortran is tight, works, and has 50 years of field testing.
Much rather work on something old and proven than new and slapdash.
Watfor and Watfiv for the win, baby!
Honourable mention to PL/1 and cobol…
Fortran, all day every day. Because every byte of the 1969 code is there for a reason.
Maybe RAM prices will bring that mindset back.
I almost hope so. But with the speed of M.2 and other formats, I wonder how much is going to end up being swap space use.
Code that has lasted, with some maintenance, for 50+ years vs code that doesn’t work from day 1? What advances we have made!
They’re taking the fail fast approaching to a whole new level.
They’re doing a fail immediately and continuously now.
The science of failure!
Don’t forget that a lot of that code has lasted for 50 years cause corporations were too cheap to update/upgrade. Profits > tech debt.
1969 code all day erryday. Fuck yeah punch cards
the fortran code was probably written by someone who knew what they were doing and didn’t need 1 gb of libraries to implement the save button.
and the fact that the code survived till today does say something about its quality. i don’t think this is hard choice.
That’s not a given. A friend of mine worked on a weather forecast implemented in Fortran by people who were better at meteorology than programming, and some functions had thousands of parameters. The parameters for one of the calls (not the function definition) were actually supplied in a separate include file.
I’m a biochemist who got into programming from the science side of it, and yeah, code written by scientists can be pretty bad. Something that I saw a lot in my field was that people who needed some code to do something as part of a larger project (such as adding back on the hydrogens to a 3d protein structure from the protein database) would write the thing themselves, and not even consider the possibility that someone else has probably written the same thing, but far better than they be can, and made it available open source. This means there’s a lot of reinventing the wheel by people who are not wheel engineers.
I find it so wild how few scientists I’ve spoken to about this stuff understand what open-source code actually means in the wider picture. Although I’ve never spoken to a scientist in my field who doesn’t know what open source means at all, and pretty much all of them understand open source software as being a good thing, this is often a superficial belief based purely on understanding that proprietary software is bad (I know someone who still has a PC running windows 98 in their lab, because of the one piece of essential equipment that runs on very old, proprietary code that isn’t supported anymore).
Nowadays, I’m probably more programmer than biochemist, and what got me started on this route was being aware of how poor the code I wrote was, and wanting to better understand best practices to improve things like reliability and readability. Going down that path is what solidified my appreciation of open source — I found it super useful to try to understand existing codebases, and it was useful practice to attempt to extend or modify some software I was using. The lack of this is what I mean by “superficial belief” above. It always struck me as odd, because surely scientists of all people would be able to appreciate open source code as a form of collaborative, iterative knowledge production
Fortran. Not even close to being a question.
Seriously, especially if it already compiles.
Implicit None gang rise up!
Never used Fortran before. So easy choice: Fortran code from 1969
I would genuinely love to find a job coding FORTRAN, mainly because it means I’d almost certainly be doing some kind of scientific computing. Way better than most tech jobs that involve boring CRUD work you don’t care about at best, or actively making the world worse implementing the whims of some billionaire sociopath at worst.
Also, the code base will likely be pretty small. If something’s made to be delivered on punch cards and run on devices that measure their memory in KB or maybe MB, it’s not going to be a ton of code. Even if it’s pure assembly, it’s going to be easier than a huge automatically generated codebase.
Rollercoaster Tycoon has joined the chat.
Compared with any modern codebase that’s still tiny.
From what I can see Rollercoaster Tycoon was hand-written by a single person, so it by definition cannot be huge.
I wish that the code was open source, because it’d be super interesting to be able to look under the hood of a game like Rollercoaster Tycoon
It kinda is. Assembly is a 1:1 machine-code equivalent, so you just have to run the game through a disassembler and you get the “source”. You just dont get the documentation.
This. I love scientific computing and would honestly love working in the field.
Coming soon:
Fortran code from 1969 that has been vibe coded since.Well, I don’t know Fortran 66. So, obviously step one is having an LLM convert it to Python for me. /s
Fortran. always Fortran.
because there’s always more documentation than with vibecode.
Well obviously with vibe coded stuff, you just put the code back in the AI and ask for documentation.
Problem solved. /s
Your comment felt like it made my blood pressure spike, because I have heard people saying this 100% without irony
Funny thing is, I would do that if there are no requirements, and the vibecode is unreadable. I would let the token-predictor create the requirements, after proof-reading and correcting it, I would create cooked-down list and run through a manager for approval, then rewrite it from scratch. My limited time and precious brain cells are too valuable to waste on reading and deciphering the half ton of sh!t an LLM produced.
If there are requirements (which are hardly applicable unfortunately) I would just rewrite the thing.
Fortran because I’ll make bank.
Fortran can be vibed too, there goes the job security :/
Fortran 66 isn’t too bad. You have to write everything yourself but if you’re just maintaining it is normally fine. Gotos get annoying, though!
Why not Fortran 90 or Fortran 2023?
Because the post specified code from 1969.
Ok
Spaghetti code ftw!
Around 2004 I had just recently graduated a shitty tech school as a DBA. Soon after I got a job via my father for one of his college buddies. My job was to convert old cobbled together FoxPro into something relatively modern. I was also hired simultaneously to the same company as a Java web developer and had to combine the two. I spent 2 hellish years there and haven’t touched code since, which sucks because I used to really love programming.
I had blanked this from my memory, but my very first programming job was to reimplement some FoxPro code in… Visual Basic. FoxPro is so strange to work in. It’s like programming in SQL, and the codebase I was in had global variables everywhere.
Fortran 😍
