I wasn’t that young protege who built their first compiler at age 10 or anything like that. In fact, I wrote my first line of code at 18 during my first year at University.
My dream when I was younger was to be a Physics researcher after watching The Big Bang Theory when I was 13. I basically wanted to scribble on paper or whiteboards all day trying to solve complex proofs in quantum mechanics or general relativity.
Yet, in my first class of my physics degree, I found myself in a computer lab being taught how to code. And it gets even worse. The language taught, and it is the first language I ever learned, was Fortran.
I have a romantic affinity for Fortran now, I have even written an article on why data scientists should consider it over Python. However, being the first language I ever learned made me not like coding that much.
For those unfamiliar with Fortran, it’s probably the oldest general high-level programming language and was first released in 1958. It hasn’t got a…