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FORTRAN's tragic fate has been its wide acceptance, mentally chaining thousands and thousands of programmers to our past mistakes.

 

Edsger W. Dijkstra

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Any military commander who is honest with himself, or with those he's speaking to, will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. He's killed people unnecessarily — his own troops or other troops — through mistakes, through errors of judgment. A hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand. But, he hasn't destroyed nations. And the conventional wisdom is don't make the same mistake twice, learn from your mistakes. And we all do. Maybe we make the same mistake three times, but hopefully not four or five. There will be no learning period with nuclear weapons. You make one mistake and you're going to destroy nations.

 

Robert McNamara

 

Who are they to try me? They should be tried first. [They are] people who are rejecting the United Nations resolutions, who are rejecting the Hague Court resolution, who are rejecting the world public opinion, who have no respect for any internation law, and who are massacring people, executing people, just imprisoning thousands and thousands and thousands without any reasons. Who is going to try them?

 

Muhammad Reza Pahlavi

 

[About Fortran] On October 11, 1963, my suggestion was to pass on a request of our customers to relax the ALGOL 60 rule of compulsory declaration of variable names and adopt some reasonable default convention such as that of FORTRAN. […] The story of the Mariner space rocket to Venus, lost because of the lack of compulsory declarations in FORTRAN, was not to be published until later.

 

C. A. R. Hoare

 

War its thousands slays, Peace its ten thousands.

 

Beilby Porteus

 

I kind of wanted to open it up a little bit more this time and kind of expose a little bit more of my vulnerable side. The most important thing for me was to share exactly how I felt because I'm sure there are thousands and thousands of people who can relate.

 

Bert McCracken