Re:What about IDL and Fortran? (Score 1)

I am a software engineer and have a BS and MS in Computer Science. I started learning languages in this sequence : FORTRAN, PASCAL,COBOL,BASIC,C,C++,JAVA. I do appreciate the great value that OOPS based languages bring to the table and how amazingly it simplifies program design and software maintenance..however each thing has its own usage..VB is an awesome language, consider the overall development time it takes when you use VB..Java/C++ and its great OO design enables us to model objects after real world objects...saying that I would come back to FORTAN, I really did love coding in FORTRAN it was an experience...but FORTRAN is again meant for its own purposes, where it is most apposite...scientific computations..mostly for engineers who dont know a whole lot about programming and dont want to learn C++...this can be easily explained..let us say a physics scientist needs to carry out some computations on Complex numbers..if he decides to go ahead with FORTRAN , he will be provided with COMPLEX data type...and he doesnt need to know more...but if he decides to go ahead with C or C++ he needs to know structures , encapsulation and other things...thus he is better off with FORTRAN...also COBOL is beautiful when it comes to handling files...PASCAL teaches us pointers...now I am learning about C# and trying to figure it out...:)