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Here's a little ditty I dreamt up to go with Billy Joel's song 'Pressure',
about one of the joys of scientific computing.

           FORTRAN

You have to learn to pace yourself
FORTRAN
You're just like everybody else
FORTRAN
You've only had to write Pascal
So far
But you will come to the day
When the only thing that counts
Are megaflops on a Cray
And you'll have to deal with
FORTRAN

You used to call me paranoid
FORTRAN
But even you can not avoid
FORTRAN
You swore that ENTRY's a sure road to ruin
Now here you are with old code
COMMON blocks are misaligned
Assigned GOTOs disturb your mind
And you cannot handle FORTRAN

All grown up and no place to go
Pascal, Prolog,
What do you know?
All your life is a Lisp machine,
Linked lists, quicksort,
What does it mean?
FORTRAN
FORTRAN

Don't ask me for help
You're all alone
FORTRAN
You'll have to code it
On your own
FORTRAN
I'm sure you'll have some cosmic rationale
But here's your program, incomplete,
Two weeks late, three times too slow
Nothing to do but log on now
And write all your code in
FORTRAN
FORTRAN

All your life is Byte Magazine
I read it too
What does it mean?
FORTRAN

I'm sure you'll have some cosmic rationale
But here you are with old code
COMMON blocks are misaligned
Assigned GOTOs disturb your mind
And you have to code in
FORTRAN
FORTRAN, FORTRAN
One, two, three, four
FORTRAN

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