@Zacharý They took it down.

@Adám that is good news.

@Adám how often does that happen?

@Zacharý Turned out that SS&C had submitted that article to the news site but had also published it themselves. This is against the news site's rules. The article is still on SS&C's blog, but now it is just SimCorp's competitor bashing SimCorp.

@Zacharý Every now and then. As RO I consider it my responsibility to keep the Orchard free from weeds.

Specifically sending it to V'dibarta Bam

Oh, it's a competitor of SimCorp ... That makes much more sense.

@Zacharý With Uriel and me here it is likely to happen, and ngn and I used to discuss religion and/or philosophy all the time…

@Zacharý Yeah, simple dirty competition bashing. We told SimCorp. Needless to say, they were "interested".

I looked at the article, and thought it was some<insert language here>worshipping person

@Zacharý My first thought was that he had been asked to maintain some old APL code, and couldn't grok it, so he decided to bash APL instead.

What they should do is bash BASIC, FORTRAN, ALGOL, and COBOL, if people still use those

Do people still use those?

@Zacharý Basic and Fortran, yes. Algol and Cobol, no. Although there's of course legacy code out there.

I mean the original style of BASIC. Not visual basic

@Zacharý Does anyone use the original style of C or APL or…?

APL and C are at least compatible with the old versions to an extent. Try running a DARTMOUTH BASIC program in Visual BASIC.

That will not work

@Zacharý Is C really backwards compatible? I understood that Arthur Whitney's single-page proto-J won't compile with modern compilers.

@Adám J doesn't count. Yes, ask any C golfer, it's backwards compatible, just not the coding style.

@Zacharý Fair enough. But modern Fortran is backwards compatible, no?

When did FORTRAN's backwards compatibility come into question?

ALGOL is NOT backwards compatible, IIRC

Ah

We started discussing the backwards compatibility of all of them not just C, APL, and BASIC. What's COBOL's backwards compatibility like?

@Zacharý No idea.

Yeah, me neither

@Adám C compilers have command line options to switch dialects, e.g. -std=c89