i am retooling some Fortran code i wrote 20 years ago, and i am surprised how easy it was for me to get back into it. and i think the reason is that Fortran is a pretty basic language, as you say, so multiplying and dividing numbers (its an astro numerical simulation) is very easy.
the problem is that the language (F77) is NOT very expressive, so when it comes time to doing certain things, it becomes impossible. now the thing to do is wrap numerical libraries with a high-level language (HLL), and i use python which i find a very expressive language. all kinds of data structures can be built with ease. and the trick is to use the expressiveness of an HLL for the hard parts of a code that are not number crunching and use Fortran or C below for floating point speed.
> It has a very compact command set, but what you can do with it is
> stunning. There are some principles in my intro to Java HTML that
> brought a similar, WOW. Then I realized because of how Java is put
> together it leads in exactly the opposite direction from FORTRAN, into
> a code mire of truly scary dimensions.
i never liked Java, but CS friends tell me it was an excellent teaching language.
> COBOL the first code for business, is thoroughly ugly, and because it
> was designed to be used by business, its programs are vastly more
> ugly. Postscript which drives much of the visual world we see is also
> a very ugly language, even if at its deepest roots in linear algebra,
> the concepts are some of the most elegant of all mathematics. Maybe I
> take that judgement back a little. Adobe engineers had to do some
> pretty elegant stuff to set up the font families and make them work in
> applications. TeX has great elegance, LaTeX doesn't.
i don't see how do you compare LaTeX to TeX like this. LaTeX after all is TeX with TeX macros.
> I never got into C or C++ far enough to see its conceptual unity. From
> what I could see, I didn't particularly like it.
check out one of the high level languages. you can do some very cool stuff in them with some ease.
Les