Listening to these fantastic programmes about code. I found myself wondering what each of these languages looked like. What is the aesthetic effect of the grammar etc - divorced from the types and eras of screens or cards or whathaveyou they might have been on?
So, to try and compare I grabbed these bits from wikipedia as images.
So, this is what Fortran looks like:
This is what COBOL looks like:
This is what BASIC looks like:
This is what Java looks like:
(Obviously, I imagine that these things look very different in different circumstances, and that this may not be typical and there are other flavours and stuff and that. I was just after a general idea. Leave me alone.)