create new things that may be done. This is powerful, but it is also dangerous.
The lack of standards can lead to less-than-stellar programmers creating
unclear sets of vocabulary that make it impossible for anyone else to maintain
what they have written. However, thoughtful programmers who are
disciplined and organized have created highly complex, yet maintainable,
programs in Forth that have been used for decades across multiple platforms.
Perhaps Forth might be described as a language for experienced programmers
who can handle total control over the CPU and want to build sophisticated
systems running in extremely limited environments. If you are old enough to
remember HP calculators and their “reverse Polish” notation, where the
operator is placed after the operands, you will find Forth familiar.
To use Forth on Ubuntu, install the package gforth, which is the GNU
implementation of a Forth programming environment.
Fortran
Fortran was developed by IBM in the 1950s for engineering and scientific
applications. Its popularity spread quickly in areas of science that are
dominated by numerical computation. Today, many of those same Fortran
programs are still maintained and in use in fields such as weather modeling
and prediction, fluid dynamics, and segments of chemistry and physics. In a
published article from 2010, Eugene Loh, an engineer at Oracle, called
Fortran the most commonly used and perhaps the ideal language for high-
performance computing (http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1820518).
Fortran is a terse language in which complex applications may be written with
relatively few statements. It is a procedural language with object-oriented
abilities. It excels at numerical computation and is often used as the language
in which programs are written to test supercomputers for speed.
To use Fortran on Ubuntu, you write programs in your favorite text editor. To
compile, you need the package gfortran, the GNU Fortran 95 compiler,
which compiles Fortran 95 on platforms supported by the gcc compiler. It
uses the gcc back end to generate optimized code.
Go
Go is an open source project and language being developed by people at
Google. It is an expressive language that aims for concise, clean code and
efficient use of resources. It has concurrency mechanisms built in to take