From FORTRAN to Visual Basic
Every programmer has a story on how they ended up developing in a particular language. You learn some in school. I had BASIC for the Apple II. That was pretty much my foundation. In graduate school I was exposed to FORTRAN on a miniframe. In my mind it was, I already know how to do that in BASIC, so how do I do that in FORTRAN?
Then I ended up in the real world with a real job with responsibilities and deadlines. There was some need to duplicate some of the prices for annuities we were importing to more than one code. I wrote a little app in FORTRAN that would scan the price file and create some additional records with the same price. Nothing to difficult until we upgraded out computers to Windows 98 and my app died. Seems the old Microsoft FORTAN compiler had some issues with the new version.
No time to panick. I printed my code and ran over to a contract programmer we were using. I had Visual Basic (VB) 4.0 on my computer. All I had to do was convert my code to the new language. With this guy’s help it worked out pretty good. I got to expand my knowledge of a new language. My code worked. We were back in business on getting our annuity prices; everyone was happy.
I never wrote another line of FORTRAN again. To this day I do a lot with VB in all of it’s various forms (VBA, VB.NET). I’ve looked at some of the newer languages like Python and Ruby, but my job requires that I do t-sql for Microsoft SQL Server. Hey, follow the money.
